Google said it is buying a Manhattan office building for $2.1 billion. The deal for the new building on Manhattan’s West Side is the most expensive sale of a single U.S. office building since the start of the pandemic—and one of the priciest in U.S. history.
Evergrande
Market participants increasingly believe that Beijing will let China property developer Evergrande fail and inflict losses on its shareholders and bondholders. The company’s debt burden is the biggest for any publicly traded real estate management or development company in the world.
Invesco State Street
Invesco is in talks to merge with State Street’s asset-management business. State Street’s asset-management unit manages nearly $4 trillion in assets while Invesco oversees $1.5 trillion in assets and manages a large ETF business.
Pimco CRE
Pimco also has become a more active real estate investor after its parent, Allianz SE, put the firm in charge of managing its Allianz Real Estate investment business. Between its own investments and those made by Allianz, Pimco acquired $12 billion in private commercial property between January 2020 and June 2021. The combined Pimco and Allianz real-estate business also originated or invested in $7 billion in real-estate loans during that time.
Household Income
Median household income was $67,500 in 2020, down 2.9% from the prior year.
Rising Rents
National asking rents rose 10.3% in August, measured on an annual basis. That marked the first double-digit increase in the more than 20 years this data has been collected.
BX Soho China
Shares in Chinese commercial-property developer Soho China Ltd. tumbled 35% Monday, after Blackstone Inc. abandoned a $3.3 billion takeover in the face of an unexpectedly long regulatory review.
Crypto Lending
The business is growing rapidly. One group of crypto lenders has $25 billion in loans outstanding to individual and institutional clients, up from $1.4 billion a year ago.
Scheduled Flights
Between Aug. 3 and Aug. 26, airlines dropped approximately 77,000 domestic flights in the United States as the Covid-19 Delta variant flared.
Closed Hotels
In April 2020, 814,000 rooms — or 15% of the U.S. hotel room inventory — closed. That figure has dropped to around 2% in June 2021, just over 100,000 rooms.