First 9 Months 2011 Transaction Activity

The first 9 months of 2011 has come and gone!  From a sales standpoint how well did we do compared to previous years?  Shown below is the criteria we used to tabulate the results:

• Sales information from the CoStar database
• Transactions closed between January 1st and September 30th
• Investment properties only (no owner user)
• Property types - apartments, industrial, flex, office, retail, mixed use
• Transactions with sales prices of $1 million or larger
• Arms length transactions
• Transactions located between Kelso, WA and Eugene, OR including Bend

Based on these criteria the chart below compares the sales activity for the first 9 months of 2011 with each of the preceding four years for the same time period.

As you can see, the sales activity for the first 9 months of 2011 has almost doubled from last year and is almost back to the same number of transactions recorded in 2008.  We are definitely on the rebound!

We then analyzed the 205 transactions by property type:

Multi-family and retail properties continue to dominate the property transactions but other property types are beginning to make their presence known.  All other property types represented 35% of the total sales transactions compared to 28% for the first 6 months of this year. 

Of the 205 transactions, 96 had brokers representing both sides of the transaction.  Forty-nine transactions had no broker representation.  The remaining 60 transactions had only one side of the transaction represented.

If you add it all up, there were a total of 156 broker paydays (2 x 96 + 60).  So if you want to know your personal market share of all the broker paydays divide your number of paydays by 156.  Shown below are the first 9 months lending sources for the 178 sales transactions where the lender was identified:

Seventy-three out of the 178 transactions (41%) were either all cash transactions, assumed the existing debt or were seller financed.  Only 105 transactions (59%) used conventional financing.  Of these, the vast majority were financed by banks 67 (64%). 

Thank goodness owners have to refinance their properties from time to time or most of the mortgage brokers would be out of business.

The sales transactions for the first 9 months of this year strongly suggests that commercial real estate is on the rebound.  Let's hope for all of our sakes that this trend continues into the foreseeable future.