Eight Must Reads for the CRE Industry Today (Sept. 27, 2022) - Wealth Management

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WMRE Staff | Sep 26, 2022

Exclusive: Fannie Mae to Announce Plan to Bolster Renters’ Credit Scores “When it comes to credit scores, renters are at a distinct disadvantage compared to homeowners. While mortgage payments are reported by lenders to credit bureaus, landlords typically don’t report rental payments—and that can hamper renters’ ability to build a credit history. Fannie Mae plans to subsidize the cost for landlords of multifamily properties it finances to help renters build their credit starting Tuesday, the mortgage giant shared exclusively with USA Today.” (USA Today)
Factory Jobs Are Booming Like it’s the 1970s “Ever since American manufacturing entered a long stretch of automation and outsourcing in the late 1970s, every recession has led to the loss of factory jobs that never returned. But the recovery from the pandemic recession has been different: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed — and then some. The resurgence has not been driven by companies bringing back factory jobs that had moved overseas, nor by the brawny industrial sectors and regions often evoked by President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump and other champions of manufacturing.” (The New York Times)
Winter Is Coming: Landlords Face Brutal Heating Season “Last winter, landlords were slammed by natural gas bills as high as 60 percent above the previous year’s levels. Utility providers such as Con Edison blamed a colder season and rising energy costs. Since September 2020, the price of natural gas has more than quadrupled, surging to $8.81 per million British thermal units, a 16-year high.” (The Real Deal)
New York Now the Busiest Shipping Port in the U.S., Leapfrogging California “The Port of New York and New Jersey is now the busiest shipping port in the in the US, outranking the California ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach in August for the first time, according to new data. The shift comes as global shipping companies have increasingly been diverting goods to the East Coast on concerns that the California ports could be shut down at any point over protracted labor negotiations with the union that represents 22,000 dock workers.” (New York Post)
The Future of the Office in the Age of Hybrid Work “The way the white-collar employee works is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, America’s office workers started working from home, adapting swiftly and seamlessly to this new reality, collaborating through Zoom, Slack, and Teams. Working from home initially worked so well, some were proclaiming the office dead. With productivity maintained, remote work appeared to be the way everyone would work in the future. However, in recent months, the cracks in this work-from-anywhere experiment have started to show.” (Colliers)
Investors Say These 22 Proptech Startups Are the Most Promising in the Field—and Can Even Survive a Housing Downturn “Funding for real-estate tech — more widely known as proptech — boomed in 2021. Startups of all stripes, including those that help buyers and renters score homes or help landlords manage properties and those that support firms in constructing and managing big buildings, attracted a record $32 billion. But this year, interest rates spiked. Money became more expensive to borrow. Housing markets are slowing down. And layoffs at proptech companies have become common.” (Insider)
Climate Resilience Design Standards Starting to Become Mandatory “As climate change worsens and the intensity of extreme weather-related events increases, meeting modern building codes may not be enough. Municipalities, nonprofit organizations, and industry groups are developing climate resilience design standards and tools, some of which are required or incentivized for publicly funded projects, and others of which may become expected or required for commercial real estate transactions.” (Urban Land Magazine)
UC Housing Crisis Forces Students into Multiple Jobs to Pay Rent, Sleeping Bags and Stress “Matthew Chin couldn’t wait to dive into the life of a UC Santa Cruz college student after the loneliness of online learning. But instead, he is missing out on the camaraderie of roommates, dorm life and full slate of campus activities he had hoped to embrace. That’s because he lives alone in a tiny trailer away from campus — the only shelter he could afford in the scenic coastal town that was recently named the nation’s second-priciest rental market. Chin was shocked at the $1,200 or more monthly rents for an apartment or dorm in Santa Cruz.” (Los Angeles Times)