Influential commercial real estate analyst and frequent media commentator Sam
Chandan has left his job as global chief economist and executive vice president
at commercial property data firm Real Capital Analytics to launch a new venture.

Chandan left the firm last month after only a year and a half, but has not made a
public statement about his future plans.

“I am a huge fan of Real Capital Analytics. It’s just a move in a different
direction,” he told The Real Deal during a break at the National Association of
Real Estate Investment Trusts conference
in Midtown today. [more]

Recent data suggests that New York City’s economy is recovering more quickly than that of the nation, though not quite as quickly as Manhattan’s commercial real estate investment market, according to Sam Chandan, chief economist for Real Capital Analytics. Writing in the Observer, and citing the New York Fed’s Coincident Economic Index, a report that aggregates statistics relating to current economic activity in New York City, Chandan said the most recent recession was not as severe as the one that preceded it in 2001. This discovery contrasts with national statistics, which show a milder recession at the beginning of the previous decade. Comments

Although developers Larry Silverstein and Harry Macklowe headlined the impressive list of speakers at Massey Knakal’s Commercial Real Estate Investment today, it was developer Sharif El-Gamal who jazzed up the audience at the second-floor auditorium in the McGraw-Hill Building in Midtown.

Speaking as part of a panel that included Brookfield Properties CEO Richard Clark, George Comfort & Sons CEO Peter Duncan and Himmel + Meringoff Properties’ managing partner Stephen Meningoff, El-Gamal talked about his company’s competitive advantages. [more]

As demand for rental housing surges throughout the country, investors are venturing beyond Class A properties, or newer, well-leased buildings in centrally located neighborhoods of big cities, Bloomberg News reported. According to Real Capital Analytics, sales of apartment building rose 96 percent to $33.7 billion in 2010 from a year earlier. Class B properties and distressed acquisitions accounted for 33 percent of sales in the fourth quarter, compared with 25 percent a year earlier, said Sam Chandan, Real Capital’s chief economist. [more]

From left: Sam Chandan, head of Real Estate Econometrics, and Dan Fasulo, managing director of Real Capital Analytics

New York City-based research firm Real Estate Econometrics has joined another New York City-based research company Real Capital Analytics, said Dan Fasulo, RCA head of research and managing director, in a release sent today by RCA. Sam Chandan, head of the approximately two-year-old national Real Estate Econometrics, will become global chief economist with RCA and will serve as executive vice president. Chandan said that the firm is joining RCA in part because of its global scope. “We are looking forward to being part of the RCA family,” Chandan said. “As the flow of real estate capital and credit becomes increasingly international, RCA’s global platform offers the foremost vantage point for thought leadership and industry impact.” TRD

From the September issue: For a year now, real estate brokers and developers in New York have
been grappling with the ripple effect of the Lehman Brothers collapse
and the Wall Street fallout. But now, on this somewhat somber
anniversary, it’s time to start looking ahead and anticipating where
the market will be a year from now.
In this month’s Q & A, The Real Deal talked to
economists, brokers and firm principals who described what the
landscape will look like for sales activity, pricing, foreclosures and
employment in the next 12 months in the city. The predictions were not
all pretty.
Indeed, one economist said that prices will have dropped another 13 percent by next September. more

CBRE’s Enoch Lawrence (left) and Sam Chandan of Real Estate Econometrics

In a sign of how troubled the market for bonds backed by commercial
real estate may be, and by extension, the future of some office
building owners, a key deadline for federal bailout money designed to
get money flowing again to landlords has come and gone without any
takers. Up until June 16, investors in those bonds, like insurance companies,
hedge funds and credit unions, had been invited to dip into the Term
Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, to borrow some of the
$200 billion fund set by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The chief reason there’s been zero interest in TALF so far, according to industry analysts, economists and brokers, is that there hasn’t been enough time to put complicated deals together. Indeed, it was only in May that the Fed announced that commercial mortgages would be eligible for TALF money, and a month wasn’t long enough for lenders to market their assets to willing buyers, they say. [more]

Commercial loan defaults are increasing even as residential
foreclosures begin to slow. A recent report from Real Estate
Econometrics found that the default rate on commercial mortgages rose
to 2.25 percent in the first quarter of 2009, up from 1.62 percent in
the fourth quarter of 2008, the biggest quarterly jump since 2003. Sam
Chandan, president of Real Estate Econometrics, said he expects the
default rate to hit 4.1 percent by the end of this year and rise to a
peak of 5.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. That could mean
foreclosure for nearly $200 billion of the close to $3.5 trillion in
commercial properties around the country. [more]

Baskin Robbins is known for having 31 flavors of ice cream. This month,
the “Flavor of the Month” is “Coconut Grove” while last
month the flavor was “Purely Parfait.” In the world of commercial real estate, the preferred investment class
or “flavor” of the year — not month — is the opportunity to pursue a
real estate mortgage note that is in default. Investment brokers were selling office buildings, multi-family
apartment houses and land for residential development at record highs
in 2006 and 2007. Today, with limited amount of debt available for
financing any real estate transaction, investment sales are down. [more]

Clockwise from left: Joseph Moinian, Sam Chandan, David Von Spreckelsen, Robert Levine, Jeffrey Levine and David Lowenfeld spoke at the New York Real Estate Summit yesterday.

Deep price drops and buyers bent on negotiation are trends in all of New York City’s boroughs, but residential developers say they are seeing distinct variations by neighborhood in the magnitude of price drops and the number of deals that make it to closing. “We have found a difference in neighborhoods in terms of closings,” said Robert Levine, president and CEO of RAL Companies & Affiliates, at a residential market panel at yesterday’s New York Real Estate Summit, hosted by The Real Deal columnist Michael Stoler. The Real Deal was a sponsor of the event. [more]