These Are The Largest Office Leases Signed In Houston In 2021

Most people who clicked on this story will stop reading right here and skip down to the good stuff. 

But those who scroll past this highfalutin message from the desk of the Editor-in-Chief will miss out on a few very important, self-indulgent bits of context. 

For starters, while you know us as the largest commercial estate news publication around, you should also know that we’re quite small in terms of our team. Across the 40 different markets we cover, our team comprises only 27 reporters, editors and correspondents. They report, edit and publish about 50 stories a day — or about 13,000 stories a year. That’s a lot in my book.

You have likely read a few of those stories, but probably not all. After all, your name is not Tom Russo or Tim Carroll. They are Bisnow’s copy editors and our team could not do what they do so well if it were not for this dynamic pair.

Editing is trench warfare. It can be an ugly affair chock-full of self-doubt, pressure to deliver on deadline, and clawing through notebooks and paragraphs to achieve a wonderful feeling: it’s done. Then we do it all again the next day and the next day after that.

The news is a never-ending grind — the daily miracle, as they say. Some of the stories below were the talk of real estate on any given day. Others were largely ignored. What they have in common is this: They represent, according to our editors at least, the very best work we produced in 2021.

Read the full story here.

In Case You Missed It...

Rising inflation  — now at its highest annual rate in three decades — has only added fuel to the multifamily fire, with rents skyrocketing across the nation in 2021. 

For developers and owners, this has led to a race of sorts between market forces largely out of their control: rising rents versus rising costs. 

Heading into 2022, the longevity of rental increases is no certain thing, while the cost of labor, materials, taxes and insurance represent a suite of wild cards for the industry. But for now, rents are outrunning costs, as owners continue to enjoy expanding revenue and profits, industry experts tell Bisnow. 

Read the full story here.

It wasn’t a question of if, but when. As the world went into lockdown in spring 2020 and the economies of the U.S. and UK fell off a cliff, real estate investors dusted off their playbooks and waited for the flood of distressed opportunities to come. 

They’re still waiting. 

In spite of the severe recessions of 2020 and the continued emergence of new variants of Covid-19, there has been very little in the way of debt distress in commercial real estate. In Q2 this year, just 1.3% of U.S. real estate sales came from distressed situations compared to a high of 9.8% in Q1 2009 after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, according to Real Capital Analytics data. And experts predict that unless there is another severe and prolonged recession, that number is unlikely to tick up. 

Read the full story here.