As of September, there were 1,364 hotels in construction in the U.S., representing 172,251 rooms. Additionally, there are 1,867 hotels with 205,829 rooms in the final planning phase and 2,217 hotels with 263,673 rooms in the planning phase.
Airbnb posted record revenue in the third quarter, punctuating its rebound from the collapse in bookings during the early days of the pandemic.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has invested $1 billion in futures-exchange giant CME Group Inc. and struck a deal to move the company’s core trading systems to the cloud. Under the deal, the technology giant’s Google Cloud unit would eventually power markets that handle trillions of dollars in trades each day.
The Federal Reserve approved plans to begin scaling back its bond-buying stimulus program this month and end it by June, a major step toward withdrawing its aggressive, pandemic-driven economic support amid a recent inflation surge.
The first three quarters of 2021 set a record for commercial property sales activity while prices also reached new highs. A lot of uncertainty still hangs over the office and retail markets, while a full recovery in the hotel business could be years away. But purchases of apartment buildings, life-science labs and industrial properties helped propel commercial sales for the first nine months of this year to $462.1 billion, up 10% from the same nine-month period in 2019.
GDP grew at a historically fast annual rate of 6.7% in the second quarter as an infusion of government stimulus, widespread business reopenings and rising vaccination rates fueled spending. Those spending drivers faded in the third quarter as the U.S. economy grew by 2.0%.
Home-price growth held at a record high in August, as demand from home buyers remained robust despite skyrocketing prices. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, which measures average home prices in major metropolitan areas across the nation, rose 19.8% in the year that ended in August.