Real Estate Daily News Buzz April 4, 2016

Real Estate Daily News Buzz is designed to give news snippets to readers that our (yet to be award winning) editors thought you could use to start your day. They come from various business perspectives, real estate, government, the Fed, local news, and the stock markets to save you time. Here you will find the headlines and what the news buzz of the day will be.

Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average jumped 107.66 points, or 0.6%, to 17,792.75. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index advanced 13.04 points, or 0.6%, to 2,072.78. The NASDAQ composite index rose 44.69 points, or 0.9%, to 4,914.54.

U.S. crude fell $1.55, or 4%, to $36.79 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, the benchmark for pricing international oils, gave up $1.66, or 4.1%, to $38.67 a barrel in London. In other energy trading, wholesale gasoline fell 5 cents, or 3%, to $1.40 a gallon. Heating oil slid 5 cents, or 4.5%, to $1.13 a gallon. Natural gas was little changed at $1.96 per 1,000 cubic feet.

US stocks jump after solid March jobs report — U.S. stocks climbed Friday after the government said job growth continued at a strong clip in March. Makers of consumer goods and household products rose, and health care companies rebounded. The solid employment report helped U.S. stocks stay out of a steep global decline. Early in the day stocks tumbled along with the prices of oil and precious metals, but they recovered in the afternoon and finished at their highest levels of the day. The Labor Department’s monthly jobs report showed that employers added 215,000 jobs last month, a sign the economy isn’t slowing down. Energy companies took big losses. Hotel companies and airlines both tumbled.

US consumer sentiment slips in March to five-month low — U.S. consumer sentiment slipped last month to lowest level since October with Americans worried about the country’s economic outlook, the University of Michigan said Friday. The university’s index of consumer sentiment dipped to 91 in March, from 91.7 in February. Richard Curtin, chief economist of the Michigan surveys, said consumers’ dim view of the economy offset improvement in their own finances. Last month’s reading was the lowest since the index registered 90 in October. A year earlier, it stood at 93. Signs of economic weakness and rising gasoline prices have taken a toll on spirits.

US manufacturing grows in March, ending 5 months of declines — U.S. manufacturers expanded in March, ending a five-month streak of declining factory activity. The Institute for Supply Management said Friday that its manufacturing index rose to 51.8 last month from 49.5 in February. Any reading above 50 signals growth. The increase suggests that U.S. factories are adapting to the turmoil abroad, where a stronger dollar and weakening economies in China, Japan and elsewhere have hurt sales. But the details of the survey-based report were somewhat uneven. New orders and production improved, but the measure of employment at manufacturers contracted in a sign that factories are letting workers go.

Marriott To Buy Starwood Hotels, After Chinese Firm Quits Pursuit “A Beijing-based banking and insurance company has lost the fight for Starwood Hotels, leaving Marriott as the prospective new owner of the company that operates the Sheraton and Westin hotel chains. Announcing its exit from takeover talks Thursday, the Anbang Insurance Group cited “various market considerations.” The withdrawal came days after Starwood said there was a good chance the Chinese firm would make a “superior proposal” to Marriott’s. That designation was important because Marriott and Starwood had signed a merger agreement back in November worth $12.2 billion in stock and cash. The price of that deal was amended on March 21 to $13.6 billion — a price that Anbang had seemed intent on beating.” (NPR)

Total U.S. Commercial, Multifamily Mortgage Debt Outstanding at $2.83 Trillion “According to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s latest Commercial / Multifamily DataBook, the fourth quarter of 2015 was the fourth highest quarter for borrowing and lending on record. Banks, life insurance companies and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all saw their highest originations volume on record. Of the major investor groups, only the commercial mortgage-backed securities market did not break a record for originations.” (World Property Journal)

DRA Advisors Completes Merger with Inland “Following the approval by Inland Real Estate Corp.’s stockholders earlier this week, funds managed by DRA Advisors LLC have acquired the company for approximately $2.3 billion, and the new company will now be known as IRC Retail Centers Inc.” (Commercial Property Executive)

The new office floor plans: flexible or demoralizing? “As employees have expressed a desire to move throughout office spaces during the day and choose how and where they work, experts in office design say they have seen a shift in traditional workplace designs in the last several years. It’s a move away from a rigid structure, in which employees are assigned to individual desks and expected to stay there, and a push toward giving them options.” (MarketWatch)

Welcome to the Future: Middle-Class Housing Projects “The quandary became flagrant last week: news circulated that the Palo Alto City Council had moved to explore subsidized housing for families earning between a hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. The proposal, advanced by Palo Alto’s vice-mayor, traveled far and wide because the numbers seemed preposterous. In much of the country, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year qualifies as wealth. The subsidized-housing idea has an eye to public employees—government officials, teachers, firefighters—and would be part of a constellation of housing efforts that the council has launched to build units in Palo Alto’s downtown, near its transit hubs. This has the admirable goal of reducing car emissions but the amusing implication that households earning a mere quarter of a million a year are unlikely to be able to afford a car.” (The New Yorker)

Hot Housing Markets Pinch Seniors “More than 6.1 million households in 2014 were primary residences rented by people age 65 and older, up 29% from 2001, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. While the 79% homeownership rate for people 65 and older is the highest of any age group, the rate is down significantly since the housing boom, when it peaked at nearly 82%. Many seniors who lost homes in the housing crash will be renting for the rest of their lives, because they have less time than younger households to recover financially.” (Wall Street Journal)

Tired of rising rent? Maybe you should consider becoming a landlord “Your rising monthly rent is a big reason that rental housing has become a hot property. Since the Great Recession ended, the overall rate of inflation has been fairly tame, by historical standards. Since July 2009, when the biggest economic storm in decades had finally lifted, the government’s measure of consumer prices has risen by about 10 percent. The average rent, on the other hand, is up nearly 14 percent.” (CNBC)

Innovative Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid dies at 65 “Born and raised in Baghdad, Hadid studied in Beirut and London, where she based the architectural firm that bore her name. She designed buildings around the world: a BMW facility in Leipzig, Germany; sleek funicular railway stations in Innsbruck, Austria; and the strikingly curved Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. She twice won Britain’s Stirling Prize for architecture and in 2004 became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, known as the “Nobel prize of architecture.” (The New York Post)

To build bus terminal, Port Authority may have to seize private property on West Side “The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s plan to replace the aging and maligned bus terminal on Eighth Avenue and West 42nd Street will likely force the bistate agency to use eminent domain. On March 11, the Port initiated the first phase of a design competition to solicit ideas for a new, larger terminal that could cost north of $10 billion and will accommodate tens of thousands of additional daily riders the agency anticipates will pour into the facility in the next 20 years.” (Crain’s New York)

How Trump’s Debt Addiction Crushed the Biggest Company He Ever Ran “The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination promises that he’d remake the U.S. economy into a growth machine and erase the country’s national credit problem. As evidence, he trumpets his success managing his own enterprises, boasting that the businesses in his portfolio have “very low debt and tremendous cash flow.” That example, Trump has declared, demonstrates the “kind of thinking this country needs with $19 trillion in debt, believe me.”  (Fortune)