Recent leases signed by new tenants has taken Lakewood Ranch Main Street, Florida to 98% leased. One more business has issued a letter of intent and is expected to sign a lease for the final tenant space on Main Street in January 2013, which means it will be 100% leased for the first time.
“This is the first time ever since the center was a pipe dream,” Julia DeCastro, director of leasing and sales for Lakewood Ranch Commercial Realty, said of having the shopping center 100% leased.
Lakewood Ranch Main Street celebrated the opening of Health Living Organics in December and Decal World in November. The University of South Florida will open its cooking school in the former Viking culinary center space in February.
When Lakewood Ranch Main Street opened in 2005, its owners planned for it to be similar to St. Armands Circle — a high-end destination shopping center — out east. But the real estate market crash in late 2008 made them rethink that concept.
Lakewood Ranch developer and Main Street co-owner Schroeder-Manatee Ranch acquired Casto Lifestyle Properties’ 50% stake in the plaza in December 2009 and began making the center a destination for families.
DeCastro said Main Street’s tenants consist primarily of family-owned businesses, and she has worked hard to create the right mix of specialty store offerings, without duplicating services. “To have a town center that’s 100% occupied in this market is just amazing,” she said.
Source: East County Observer, (Jan 22, 2014)
Commercial and multifamily mortgage lending is expected to increase in 2014 as lenders’ appetites to place new loans grow even stronger, according to a new Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) survey of the top commercial and multifamily mortgage origination firms.
MBA polled lenders on their expectations in the New Year. A full 91 percent of the top firms expect originations to increase in 2014, with 48 percent expecting an increase of 5 percent or more. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) expect their own firm’s originations to increase by 5 percent or more.
“Commercial and multifamily lenders anticipate a market in which lending continues to grow, and their firm gets a bigger piece of the pie,” says Jamie Woodwell, MBA’s vice president for commercial real estate research. “Borrowers’ appetites to take out new loans are expected to remain strong, but perhaps drop a bit from 2013 levels. The resulting competition to lend leads originators to expect loan risk to increase marginally in the face of moderating returns.”
A majority of respondents expect originations for commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS), commercial banks and life companies and pension funds to increase, and for originations for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA to decrease: 65 percent anticipate a “very strong” appetite among firms to make loans and 23 percent anticipate a “very strong” appetite among borrowers to take out loans. Lenders were surveyed on a scale of “very weak, weak, fair, strong, or very strong.”
In a survey of 500 small businesses in the United States, 41 percent reported increasing levels of stress. That's not good, but it's a lot better than it was: 49 percent said stress was increasing in 2012, and 50 percent thought so in 2011.
Stress among small business owners has been coming down from even higher levels during the height of the financial crisis, which is good news for everybody.
Despite being less stressed than they were, small business owners are not overly optimistic about 2014. Fifty percent of them said that they were, down from 55 percent in 2013 but up from 45 percent in 2012, pointing towards it trending sideways.
Owners do, however, have higher hopes than the rest of the world, where optimism dropped to 38 percent from 48 percent last year. Optimism in the U.S. always leads the rest of the world by a pretty wide margin.
Source: 2014 Outlook: The Good News Is, You'll Be Less Stressed, Inc.com (Dec 31, 2013)
