While leasing activity and vacancy trends suggest the U.S. commercial real estate market is stabilizing, office values are still well below post-pandemic peaks, recent reports show.
As owners scramble to make payments on under-occupied office buildings, many lenders are reluctant to foreclose to avoid the headache of taking ownership and reselling the properties, according to David Marino, cofounder of Hughes Marino, a San Diego-based corporate real estate advisory firm.
According to Cushman and Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services company, national office sublease inventory in the first quarter declined by 13.6 percent year over year, to 101 million square feet, while vacancy may have peaked. Sublease space peaked in January 2023, at 189 million square feet, according to the commercial real estate services firm CBRE Group….