With few lenders doling out money these days, commercial real estate sales — including office, mall and warehouse properties — are expected to be less than half of last year’s record-setting $514 billion, according to Real Capital Analytics of New York. More than $14.5 billion in deals have been canceled or pulled away from this year, including about $1 billion in the Washington region, according to Cassidy & Pinkard Colliers.
Locally, about 1 million square feet of office space is dark and empty, according to Reis Inc., a New York-based real estate research firm. “We haven’t had the second shoe drop,” said Dan Fasulo, a managing director at Real Capital Analytics, the real estate research company.
In Chicago, a marquee, $500 million project of offices, retail and a hotel at the city’s landmark Union Station is years behind schedule after a deal to get a loan from Eurohypo, a real estate bank in Frankfurt, Germany, fell through, leaving the developer to try to secure another.
One major fear is that Washington, long considered a bulwark because of its steadily growing economy anchored by the federal government and the spinoff of related businesses leasing office space, is growing “increasingly vulnerable, as leasing activity has eased to its slowest pace in over a decade,” said Sigrid Zialcita, director of research at Cushman & Wakefield.
