Conference: Commercial real estate to get worse

A grim picture will continue into 2010, said speakers at this year’s Urban Land Institute Fall Meeting at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, compared the outlook to the deep economic recession of the early 1990s. The recession began in the early part of this year and remained moderate until September, when the situation became more severe, he explained. Jon Southard, principal with CB Richard Ellis’ Torto Wheaton Research in Boston, bluntly stated that the country is looking into a tremendous abyss.