Midtown Dead? No, It’s A Good Time to Buy

When it comes to working from home and the flight from midtown Manhattan offices the past year, one expert on commercial real estate said it isn’t the end of the metro area way of life: it’s a great time to buy.

“There’s some great deals. I mean, on both rents, leases, and purchases in many of these markets. So tremendous opportunities, and there’s a lot of power on the sidelines, who is well aware of it,” CEO Anthony Romano of the Commercial Real Estate analytics firm CREtelligent. “In San Francisco, Manhattan, in Dallas in the Miami marketplace, there’s some incredible opportunities that I think people will seize.”

At CREtelligent, Romano helped launch the Radius platform, an all-in-one automated appraisal platform that draws site data for identifying commercial properties. When he joined the firm, he aimed at making the commercial real estate world as seamless as some residential loans.

“Before, during, and after the commercial real estate transaction, it’s super inefficient,” Smith said. “We wanted to say, how do we fix it? A client of ours, an investor, a broker, a bank, or anybody who’s involved in the transaction, can come to the Radius platform and put in an address and APN, and identify their property.”

Instead of ordering 10 or 12 assessments from a handful of sources, a processor must only visit the CREtelligent site. Based on the know-how it took to create the platform, Romano said the trends like the 10 year Treasury return are directing the CRE market on the up and up in the coming months.

Romano said that most commercial properties have a Loan-to-Value (LTV) ratio of about 70% in his experience. If a large office building or retail store has a $10 million mortgage keeping it open, it would have to drop by $3 million before the bank starts getting uneasy- a point the market is nowhere near.

Kevin Travers was a Reporter at deBanked.