Shares in Chinese commercial-property developer Soho China Ltd. tumbled 35% Monday, after Blackstone Inc. abandoned a $3.3 billion takeover in the face of an unexpectedly long regulatory review.
Offices in 10 major U.S. cities were just 33.1% occupied in the week ending Aug. 25. That figure is a slight increase over the prior week but down from a 34.8% peak in late July.
Asking rents for houses rose nearly 13% for the year to date through July, the highest annual increase in the past five years. The sharp rise partly reflects increasing demand from people who can’t afford to buy homes, and the slow supply of new houses as construction trails historical levels relative to population growth.
Blackstone completed their previously announced acquisition of QTS Realty Trust, a leading provider of data center solutions across a diverse footprint spanning more than 7 million square feet of owned mega scale data center space within North America and Europe, for approximately $10 billion.
The Supreme Court on Thursday lifted the latest federal ban on evictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, siding with landlords against a moratorium the Biden administration imposed this month despite questions about its legality.
Shared office space firms are enjoying a rise in sales this summer as U.S. businesses grappling with the seismic changes in the workspace world sparked by the pandemic seek flexible and short-term solutions. Hundreds of companies particularly in the technology sector are taking spaces from these firms, ranging from a handful of desks to over 50,000 square feet for periods as short as one month. Many individuals are also doing this on their company’s dime as they wait for their employers to figure out when it is safe to require workers to return to pre-pandemic offices.
The private-label mortgage market—in which financial firms serve the middleman role of creating giant pools of loans and selling them to investors—had more than $42 billion of issuance in the second quarter. That is the most since the pandemic started and almost the most for any quarter since the last financial crisis.
A divided Supreme Court lifted part of New York’s eviction moratorium, saying the state had gone too far in protecting tenants at the expense of landlords. The high court blocked a state measure that made it easy for tenants to invoke eviction protections by self-certifying that they were facing financial hardships during the Covid-19 pandemic. Landlords generally couldn’t challenge such certifications.
Cushman & Wakefield will make a $150 million investment in the planned merger between WeWork and a public company later this year. That merger, expected to value WeWork at $9 billion including debt, will cap off the firm’s effort to reconstruct its balance sheet following the high-profile collapse of its planned initial public offering in late 2019.
