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“Billionaire Roundtable” weighs in on commercial real estate
At CNBC’s recent “Billionaire Roundtable,” real estate bigwigs Sam Zell, chairman of Equity International, Wilbur Ross, chairman and CEO of WL Ross & Co., and Richard LeFrak, president and chairman of the LeFrak Organization, weighed in on the outlook for commercial real estate. Zell appeared the most optimistic of the bunch, arguing that headlines projecting the impending collapse of the commercial real estate market have been greatly exaggerated. While Ross said he believes the fallout from Dubai‘s debt crisis wouldn’t be “the terrific contagion that some people had thought,” he insisted that commercial real estate will nonetheless be fighting an uphill battle for quite some time. “You’d be amazed how little office and retail space unemployed people need,” he said. “The biggest victims are going to be the regional banks.”