Features

The United States devotes a lot of land to parking, with nearly 500 million parking spaces nationwide. That equates to around 4 million acres or 6,000 square miles of surface parking — an amount of space roughly equal to the land area of Hawaii.  With about 250 million cars on the roads today, that’s more than 700 square feet or two surface parking spaces for every single car.  It probably doesn’t seem like it when you are circling the block for the tenth time looking for that perfect space, but trust me — we have plenty of parking in this country. Remember, that’s just surface parking — nothing above or below those spaces.  It doesn’t account for parking structures, mixed-use projects or garages attached to suburban single-family homes across the U.S. If those are added, the total spaces skyrockets into the billions by some estimates. It is no mystery how we got here. The growth patterns of the United States are well documented. The sprawling development of most American cities has solidified the dependence on the automobile, with cars and roads claiming more and more real estate. This, in turn, continues to spread development out further, which fosters the need …

LAS VEGAS — This is a “Rodney Dangerfield recovery,” declares Dr. Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Much like the late comedian, it gets no respect. Referred to by President Barack Obama as “the epitome of calm,” the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve shared his insights during a one-on-one interview with Marcus & Millichap’s new CEO, Hessam Nadji, as part of the brokerage firm’s 18th annual Retail Trends program at the Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel early Monday evening. The program was held in conjunction with the International Council of Shopping Centers’ (ICSC) RECon event, the marquee convention in the shopping center industry. This year the convention attracted 36,000 registered attendees, up from 35,000 a year ago and a post-recession high. The annual convention is a wall-to-wall networking and dealmaking event with educational sessions mixed in. “In some dimensions it has been a strong recovery, in others it has been disappointing,” says Bernanke, who served as Fed chairman from February 2006 through January 2014. The Upside U.S. employers have added 15 million jobs over the past seven years, says Bernanke triumphantly before rattling off some other positive economic indicators. The unemployment rate is down to 5 percent, housing …

NEW YORK — Chinese direct investment in U.S. real estate has grown dramatically since 2010, according to a new report compiled by Rosen Consulting Group (RCG) and New York-based Asia Society, a nonprofit education organization. The report, titled “Breaking Ground: Chinese Investment in U.S. Real Estate,” provides a comprehensive analysis of Chinese inbound investment in all areas of U.S. real estate. “This wave of investment is coming from diverse sources in China,” says Arthur Margon, a partner at RCG and one of the authors of the report. “But that’s really a small piece of the potential investor universe.” More than any foreign investor other than Canada, China stands out for the breadth, depth and speed of its participation in the U.S. real estate market. Following negligible investment activity from 2005 to 2009, in 2010 Chinese acquisitions of existing U.S. commercial real estate assets surged to $585 million and has increased exponentially since then. Chinese investors acquired over $17.1 billion of existing commercial property between 2010 and 2015, representing an annual growth rate of 70 percent, according to the report. Half of that investment came in 2015 alone. Penchant for Office Space, Hotels  While the majority of commercial real estate transaction volume between …

A modest pullback by U.S employers in April doesn’t signal an end to the recent trend of strong job creation, but it adds to a string of subpar economic reports, says Robert Bach, director of research for the Americas at brokerage firm Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a net gain of 160,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in April, well below the 200,000 jobs projected in Bloomberg’s survey of economists. What’s more, the increase in total nonfarm payroll employment for February was revised from 245,000 to 233,000, and from 215,000 to 208,000 in March. That means the U.S economy added 19,000 fewer jobs in February and March than first believed. The nation’s real gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annualized rate of only 0.5 percent during the first three months of 2016, Bach points out, the weakest quarterly pace in two years. Weaker than expected retail sales, softness in business capital expenditures and a pullback in corporate earnings also have raised some red flags. “Taken together, these data points confirm the economy is navigating a soft patch that merits close observation in the months ahead, particularly with the added uncertainty created by the November …