Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust is selling the 1,000-room JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort and Spa for $800 million in a deal that is being called the second-biggest hotel transaction since the pandemic and a major bet on the convention and leisure industry. The hotel is being bought by Nashville, Tennessee-based Ryman Hospitality Properties Inc.

Investors are bracing for a flood of more than $1 trillion of Treasury bills in the wake of the debt-ceiling fight, potentially sparking a new bout of volatility in financial markets by overwhelming buyers, jolting markets and raising short-term borrowing costs.

Compared with the S&P 500 traditional index’s 11% gain, the equally weighted version has added 1.1%. That is the largest-ever outperformance by the S&P 500 on a year-to-date basis based on data starting in 1990.

Derivatives markets show investors now expect the Fed’s target rate to sit at 5% at year-end, up from just above 4% last month.

Despite steady job gains, Americans are growing more pessimistic about economic growth, which slowed in the first quarter. Consumer confidence fell in May for the second straight month.

In the first quarter, banks’ real-estate loans, excluding residential single- to four-family homes, yielded 5.4%. That represented a rise of more than 1.7 percentage points over a year earlier. Those residential home-loan yields, by contrast, rose just over 0.6 point from a year earlier, to 3.96%.

The ratio of money banks lent out compared to property value dropped to 51% LTV this spring, a 30-year low in commercial mortgages.

On a year-over-year basis, the home price index rose 0.7% in March, down from a 2.1% annual rate the prior month. The annual increase was the smallest since May 2012.

Office REIT stock prices posted a 48% decline since the start of 2020. Over that same period, the S&P 500 index is up 37%.

Extended stay hotels remain an enduring bright spot for a hospitality industry that was rocked by the pandemic. These properties had an occupancy rate of 74.7% last year, significantly higher than overall hotel occupancy in the U.S., which reached 62.6% in 2022.