Commercial real estate resumes rapid descent

The slight slowing of decline in early summer is over.

Commercial real estate prices…renewed steep declines and low transaction volume in July… The [Moody's/REAL Commercial Property Price Index] was down 5.1% from June after having declined by only 1% the prior month. It is now 30.8% below what it was a year earlier and 38.7% below the peak measured in October of 2007.
Overall market transaction volume continued the pattern of calendar 2009. “The market has averaged about 375 sales per month for the seven months in 2009,” said Moody”s Managing Director Nick Levidy. “Over the same time period in 2008, sales were averaging nearly 1,100 a month.”

The unwritten point that never seems to get mentioned anymore is that the summer of 2008 was well into a recession. Bear Stearns had already failed, the government had already started to move to bail out the real estate market, the credit markets were largely frozen up, and unemployment was climbing.
Even if we were somehow reproducing the same numbers we were a year ago, they would still be staggeringly bad. The fact that we are producing just a fraction of those numbers is awful.

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did you see that housing price recovery map?

in the previous Instapopulist? I'd like to see those estimates validated/discredited but one thing I liked was they mentioned income (finally) being able to afford these home prices in that projection.

You're picking up on (again) something I've noticed for some time...we have some folk who are focusing in on rate of change, otherwise known as slope, otherwise known as trend lines. The only number that gives me any real sign of hope is the ISM going above 50 (and other manufacturing data coming in looking much better). I mean seriously, grabbing at some cash for clunkers "pop" in retail sales as evidence of a "V" recovery....please! I'm sorry, I gotta call that one "grasping at straws" at this point.

When, by the absolute figures, the data is pretty much at recession levels, esp. initial unemployment claims.

Not only did the official recession start in December, 2007, even before that wages were being repressed, careers destroyed, overall middle class income further squeezed. It was just a housing bubble, with it's 3.5% GDP contribution, masked it.

Now we have some new "coming tsunamis", like regional/smaller bank implosion, CRE and option arms (interest only) residential mortgages, which to me really give credibility to the "W" or "double dip", so now my question is....on the "double dip" possibility, is that too a relative comparison to the Q1 2009 "cliff dive" caused by the actual financial implosion?

Because comparing troughs to troughs doesn't mean one is ever out of the "valley of death". It's just "we're out of that really nasty crevice of doom we just feel into".