Commercial Real Estate: Not As Bad As Residential Real Estate

The front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning had some rare good real estate news, however reserved:

Even optimistic commercial-property developers are stacking sandbags to hold back a financial deluge in the market for office towers, hotels, shopping malls and other commercial real estate.

The consolation is that it looks like commercial property in the U.S. faces a once-every-25-year flood, not the once-a-century inundation facing the nation's housing market.

I wrote in last week's Observer about how the Manhattan investment sales market has tumbled from its peak months of 2006 and 2007. But "tumbled" is a relative term--the borough, the nation's most coveted market for trading large properties and property portfolios, still recorded at least $1.35 billion in investment sales in January, the last month for which complete data was available.