Bone-Chilling “Plateau” in Apartment Boom Resurfaces, Smartest Money Bails Out
Bone-Chilling Plateau in Apartment Boom Resurfaces, Smartest Money Bails Out
by Wolf Richter December 17, 2015
[font color="blue"]Last time a plateau was declared, the market crashed.[/font]
Legendary real-estate bottom-and-top picker Sam Zell, chairman of apartment mega-landlord Equity Residential, got on Bloomberg TV and said, There is a high probability that we are looking at a recession in the next 12 months.
This is not even a remote possibility in the Feds miserably slow-growth forecasts it issued yesterday. But Zell was once again having a will of his own. He offered a laundry list of reasons: Multinationals are announcing mass-layoffs; global trade is deteriorating; Chinas economy might be spiraling down; and the strong dollar is hitting US production.
But he said this only after hed unloaded a ton of commercial real estate: in total 23,262 apartments in five states. The deal was announced at the end of October. Another 4,728 apartments are to be dumped next year.
As his firm pocketed the $5.4 billion it got from Starwood Capital Group for these units, Zell said: With pricing currently available in the commercial real estate market, it is very hard not to be a seller. ...............(more)
http://wolfstreet.com/2015/12/17/bone-chilling-term-plateau-in-apartment-boom-resurfaces-smartest-money-bails-out/