$1 Trillion Norway Wealth Fund Sees "Red Flag" In Real Estate Market

Back in September, we pointed out that assets managed by Norway"s sovereign wealth fund had surged to over $1 trillion after they made the controversial decision to increase their exposure to global equity bubbles (see: Norway Wealth Fund Assets Surge To Over $1 Trillion On Massive 70% Allocation To Equities).  The move has worked out perfectly in the short term, though we still have our doubts as to whether the "greater fool" theory works over the long term...certainly it never has before but maybe this time is different.

Alas, as Bloomberg points out today, bubbles in equity markets aren"t the only ones to have attracted the attention of Norway"s wealth management team which is scooping up commercial real estate projects all over the world, despite their own acknowledgement of "red flags."

There may be worrying developments in some property markets, but the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund says it has no intention of pulling back from real estate.

 

A gap is opening between what stock-pickers think real estate is worth and what assets could be worth in the physical market, a potential sign that a correction could be looming. For example, the largest real estate investment trust in the U.K., Land Securities, now trades at a 36 percent discount to net asset value.

 

“It’s clearly a red flag in pricing if anything is too far off in any direction,” Karsten Kallevig chief executive officer of Norges Bank Real Estate Management, said in an interview at his Oslo office on Wednesday.

So where are the Norwegians looking to lease you some office space?  Well, only in "prime spots" like New York"s Times Square...

Kallevig, 43, now oversees $24 billion in key real estate, including much of London’s Regent Street, as well as properties on Times Square and the Champs Elysees, among other prime spots. Overall, the fund holds about $1 trillion in stocks, bonds and real estate, and is in the process of building its property holdings to about 7 percent of its total portfolio.

 

So far, the fund still has an appetite for new acquisitions. “I haven’t pulled back mandates, that’s for sure,” Kallevig said.

 

After splitting off from the rest of the fund’s benchmark portfolio and increasing its scope to buy real estate last year, Kallevig is expanding his internal top management team. In September, he appointed two new chief investment officers to oversee the U.S. and European markets.

 

The fund’s strategy is to focus on about 10 global cities. The new CIOs see similarities in Europe and the U.S., and are competing with largely the same bidders on both sides of the Atlantic for the most prestigious properties. “It’s the same type of names we’re seeing across all our markets, the deals that we target are relatively large,” Per Loken, who’s in charge of the U.S. markets, said in an interview.

Of course, they may want to take note of the tiny surge in commercial real estate capacity in New York that has recently resulted in massive tenants like Ernst & Young abandoning their 1 million square feet of office space in Times Square in favor of something in a less touristy area of town.

The most recent is Ernst & Young LLP. Its departure from 5 Times Square, announced this month, may leave the tower’s million or so square feet of office space empty. The neighborhood’s effective office rents -- the rents that tenants actually pay, after concessions -- have fallen by 1 percent annually for two years, according to CoStar Group Inc., a research firm that tracks office leasing.

 

One problem is a rise in tourism and a proliferation of panhandlers. Some are dressed as Elmo and Spider-Man; others, like the “desnudas,” are hardly dressed at all.

 

“It’s not ideal to wind through costumed characters on your way to work,” said Lauren Baker, New York City market analyst for CoStar. “There’s so much noise and commotion.” The neighborhood “obviously isn’t ideal for professional tenants,” she said.

As a study released last month by the New York Building Congress noted, a massive supply glut of new office space flooding the city has certainly made it easier for large firms like E&Y to find great deals.

The non-residential sector, which was responsible for 32 percent of all New York City construction spending in the decade between 2006 and 2015, accounted for 41 percent of all spending in 2016. The only other time over the past two decades that non-residential accounted for such a large share was 2010, when the rebuilding of the World Trade Center was at its peak and billions of additional dollars were being invested in the new Barclays Center and the renovation of Madison Square Garden.

 

At the moment, the primary driver of non-residential spending continues to be office construction, which is at its highest levels in three decades. The Building Congress estimates that 15 million square feet of office space will be completed in Manhattan alone during the three-year forecast period, with an additional 2 million square feet of office space anticipated for completion in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

On the bright side, at least Norway will be able to offer new tenants a first row view of Times Square"s "desnudas" and other charming panhandlers.

NYC Commercial Real Estate Sales Plunge Over 50% As Owners Lever Up In The Absence Of Buyers

So what do you do when the bubbly market for your exorbitantly priced New York City commercial real estate collapses by over 50% in two years?  Well, you lever up, of course. 

As Bloomberg notes this morning, the "smart money" at U.S. banking institutions are tripping over themselves to throw money at commercial real estate projects all while "dumb money" buyers have completely dried up.

A growing chasm between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers think their properties are worth has put the brakes on deals. In New York City, the largest U.S. market for offices, apartments and other commercial buildings, transactions in the first half of the year tumbled about 50 percent from the same period in 2016, to $15.4 billion, the slowest start since 2012, according to research firm Real Capital Analytics Inc.

At the same time, the market for debt on commercial properties is booming. Investors of all stripes -- from banks and insurance companies to hedge funds and private equity firms -- are plowing into real estate loans as an alternative to lower-yielding bonds. That’s giving building owners another option to cash in if their plans to sell don’t work out.

“Sellers have a number in mind, and the market is not there right now,” said Aaron Appel, a managing director at brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. who arranges commercial real estate debt. “Owners are pulling out capital” by refinancing loans instead of finding buyers, he said.

But don"t concern yourself with talk of bubbles because Scott Rechler of RXR would like for you to rest assured that the lack of buyers is not at all concerning...they"ve just "hit the pause button" while they wander out in search of the ever elusive "price discovery."  

At 237 Park Ave., Walton Street Capital hired a broker in March to sell its stake in the midtown Manhattan tower, acquired in a partnership with RXR Realty for $810 million in 2013. After several months of marketing, the Chicago-based firm opted instead for $850 million in loans that value the 21-story building at more than $1.3 billion, according to financing documents. The owners kept about $23.4 million.

“The basic trend is you have a really strong debt market and a sales market that has hit the pause button while it seeks to find price discovery,” said Scott Rechler, chief executive officer of RXR.

The debt market has become so appealing that landlords are looking at mortgage options while simultaneously putting out feelers for buyers, said Rechler, whose company owns $15 billion of real estate throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. That’s a departure for Manhattan’s property owners, who in prior years would pursue one track at a time, he said.

Of course, this isn"t just a NYC phenomenon as sales of office towers, apartment buildings, hotels and shopping centers across the U.S. have been plunging since reaching $262 billion nationally in 2015, just behind the record $311 billion of real estate that changed hands in 2007, according to Real Capital. Property investors are on the sidelines amid concern that rising interest rates will hurt values that have jumped as much as 85 percent in big cities like New York, compounded by overbuilding and a pullback of the foreign capital that helped power the recent property boom.

The tough sales market has put some property owners in a bind -- most notably Kushner Cos., which has struggled to find partners for 666 Fifth Ave., the Midtown tower it bought for a record price in 2007. The mortgage on the building will need to be refinanced in 18 months.

Thankfully, at least someone interviewed by Bloomberg seemed to be grounded in reality with Jeff Nicholson of CreditFi saying that it just might be a "red flag" that buyers have completely abandoned the commercial real estate market at the same time that owners are massively levering up to take cash out of projects.

Some lenders view seeking a loan to take money off the table as a red flag, according to Jeff Nicholson, a senior analyst at CrediFi, a firm that collects and analyzes data on real estate loans. It may signal the borrower is less committed to the project, and makes it easier to walk away from the mortgage if something goes wrong, he said.

But, it"s probably nothing...

Record Apartment Building-Boom Meets Reality: First CRE Decline Since The Great Recession

By Wolf Richter of WolfStreet

Even the Fed put commercial real estate on its financial-stability worry list.

No, the crane counters were not wrong. In 2017, the ongoing apartment building-boom in the US will set a new record: 346,000 new rental apartments in buildings with 50+ units are expected to hit the market.

How superlative is this? Deliveries in 2017 will be 21% above the prior record set in 2016, based on data going back to 1997, by Yardi Matrix, via Rent Café. And even 2015 had set a record. Between 1997 and 2006, so pre-Financial-Crisis, annual completions averaged 212,740 units; 2017 will be 63% higher!

These numbers do not include condos, though many condos are purchased by investors and show up on the rental market. And they do not include apartments in buildings with fewer than 50 units. This chart shows just how phenomenal the building boom of large apartment developments has been over the past few years:

The largest metros are experiencing the largest additions to the rental stock. The chart below shows the number of rental apartments to be delivered in those metros in 2017. But caution in over-interpreting the chart – the population sizes of the metros differ enormously.

The New York City metro includes Northern New Jersey, Central New Jersey, and White Plains and is by far the largest metro in the US. So the nearly 27,000 apartments it is adding this year cannot be compared to the 5,400 apartments for San Francisco (near the bottom of the list). The city of San Francisco is small (about 1/10th the size of New York City itself), and is relatively small even when part of the Bay Area is included.

Other metros on this list are vast, such as the Dallas-Fort Worth metro which includes the surrounding cities such as Plano. Driving through the area on I-35 East gives you a feel for just how vast the metro is. However, I walk across San Francisco in less than two hours:

Special note: Chicago is adding 7,800 apartments even though the population has begun to shrink. So this isn’t necessarily going to work out.

This building boom of large apartment buildings is starting to have an impact on rents. In nearly all of the 12 most expensive rental markets, median asking rents have fallen from their peaks, and in several markets by the double digits, including Chicago (-19%!), Honolulu, San Francisco, and New York City.

And it has an impact on the prices of these buildings. Apartments are a big part of commercial real estate. They’re highly leveraged. Government Sponsored Enterprises such as Fanny Mae guarantee commercial mortgages on apartment buildings and package them in Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities. So taxpayers are on the hook. Banks are on the hook too.

This is big business. And it is now doing something it hasn’t done since the Great Recession. The Commercial Property Price Index (CPPI) by Green Street, which tracks the “prices at which commercial real estate transactions are currently being negotiated and contracted,” plateaued briefly in December through February and then started to decline. By June, it was below where it had been in June 2016 – the first year-over-year decline since the Great Recession:

Some segments in the CPPI were up, notably industrial, which rose 9% year over year, benefiting from the shift to ecommerce, which entails a massive need for warehouses by Amazon [Is Amazon Eating UPS’s Lunch?] and other companies delivering goods to consumers.

But prices of mall properties fell 5%, prices of strip retail fell 4%, and prices of apartment buildings fell 3% year-over-year.

So for renters, there is some relief on the horizon, or already at hand – depending on the market. There’s nothing like an apartment glut to bring down rents. See what the oil glut in the US has done to the price of oil.

Investors in apartment buildings, lenders, and taxpayers (via Fannie Mae et al. that guarantee commercial mortgage-backed securities), however, face a treacherous road. Commercial real estate goes in cycles as the above chart shows. Those cycles are not benign. Plateaus don’t last long. And declines can be just as sharp, or sharper, than the surges, and the surges were breath-taking.

Even the Fed has put commercial real estate on its financial-stability worry list and has been tightening monetary policy in part to tamp down on the multi-year price surge. The Fed is worried about the banks, particularly the smaller banks that are heavily exposed to CRE loans and dropping collateral values.

But the new supply of apartment units hitting the market in 2018 and 2019 will even be larger. In Seattle, for example, there are 67,507 new apartment units in the pipeline.

Dead Mall Stalking: One Hedge Fund Manager’s Tour Across Middle-America – Part 2

Via AdventuresInCapitalism.com,

Continued from Part 1...

Malls are bearing the brunt of changes in retail, but they’re only the canary in the coal mine.

Let’s start with a simple premise; commercial real estate (CRE) will change more in the next decade than it has in the past hundred years. Anyone who thinks they can fully foresee how it will evolve is lying to you. The only certainty is that highly leveraged real estate investors and lenders will be obliterated as current models evolve faster than anticipated.

In the past, retail was retail, warehouse was warehouse and office was office—the same for all other CRE classes. There was some cross-over, but the main commercial real estate components stayed segmented for the most part. Now, with big box stores, the lowest hanging fruit for online shopping to knock off, going to dodo-land, there will be hundreds of millions of feet of well-located space suddenly becoming available. People act as if there are enough Ulta Beauty and Dick’s Sporting Goods to go around. However, you cannot fill all of this space with the few big box retail concepts still expanding—especially as many stalwarts are themselves shrinking.

As a result, a huge game of musical chairs is about to take place. Why pay $20/ft for mid-rise office space, if you can now move into an abandoned Sports Authority for $5/ft. Sure, it doesn’t come with windows, but employees like open plan space and there’s plenty of parking. Besides, with the rental savings, you can offer your staff an in-house fitness facility and cafeteria for free. Does your mega-church need a larger space? There’s probably a former Sears or Kmart that perfectly accommodates you at $3/ft. Have an assisted living facility with an expiring lease? Why not move it to an abandoned JC Penney—the geriatrics will feel right at home, as they’re the only ones still shopping there.  

Go onto any real estate website and you will find out that huge plan space is nearly free. No one knows what the hell to do with it and the waves of bankruptcy in big box are just starting. As online evolves, these waves will engulf other segments of retail as well.

Type Macy’s into Loopnet.com and look at how many millions of feet of old Macy’s are available for under $10/ft to purchase. Retail’s problems are about to become everyone’s problems in CRE. When the old Macy’s rents for $2/ft, what happens to everyone else’s rents? EXACTLY!!! What happens if a CRE owner is leveraged at 60% (currently considered conservative) and leasing at $15/ft when the old HHGregg across the street is offered for rent at $3/ft? An office owner can lower his rents a few dollars, but at the new price deck, he cannot cover his interest cost, much less his other operating expenses. What happens to a suddenly emptying mid-rise office building? It has higher operating expenses than the box store due to full-time security and cleaning—maybe it’s a zero—in that future market rents no longer cover the operating expenses of the asset, much less offer a return on investment. I know, crazy—that’s how musical chairs works when demand contracts and the supply stays the same.

What happens to the guys who lent against these assets? Kaplooey!!!

America currently has more feet of retail space per capita than any other country. For that matter, America has more feet of office and other CRE types per capita as well. A decade of low interest rates has made this problem substantially worse. Think of the two malls that I spoke about in the last piece—they weren’t done in by the internet, they were done in by a tripling of retail space in a cities that are barely growing. These cities simply ran out of shoppers for all of this space. Now the mall is empty—heck the strip retail is only partly filled in. The next step is that rents will drop—dramatically. The owners of each asset, the mall and the strip center will go bust. Neither has a cap structure that is designed for dramatically lower rents. Neither has an org structure designed for carving up this space for the sorts of eclectic tenants that will eventually absorb it over the next few decades.

CRE has had it so good for the past 35 years, that most owners have never seen a down cycle. Sure, Dallas had too much supply in the early ‘90’s. Silicon Valley over-expanded in the early ‘00’s. It took a few years for it to be absorbed. Anyone who had capital during the bust made a fortune. This time may really be different. There’s too much supply. Short of blowing it up, it will be with us for years into the future. Without dramatic economic or population growth, some of it may NEVER be absorbed.

As an investor, this is all interesting to understand, but you don’t fully comprehend it until you have visited a few dozen of these facilities and seen how owners are trying to cope with the problem. In Miami, space is constricted. In Texas, there’s more CRE than I’ve ever seen. They keep putting it up—even if there isn’t demand currently. For three decades, they’ve always been able to fill it over time. For the first time ever, they can’t seem to fill it—in fact, demand is now declining. It is now obvious; there will be a whole lot of pain for CRE owners and lenders. Of course, someone’s pain can be someone’s gain.

To be continued…