A Swiss building-materials company will spinoff of its North American operations, Amrize, the biggest cement provider and second-biggest commercial roofing provider in North America. It will debut as a public company with a market capitalization of $30 billion, marking the biggest spinoff so far this year.
An investment arm of insurer Prudential Financial will buy up to $500 million of consumer loans from technology-backed consumer lender Affirm Holdings for a period of three years. Most of the loans come due in six months and Affirm will be able to re-lend the investment throughout the life of the deal, allowing it to finance $3 billion of buy-now-pay-later loans. The deal is part of a growing wave of transactions pairing a handful of large private-credit investors with financial technology companies that are replacing banks as go-to lenders for the American public.
Apartment occupancy among the nation’s 50 largest metro areas stayed steady in May month-to-month, at 95.7%, but is up 90 basis points year-to-date. And while all of those markets posted annual growth in occupancy, 40% were down on a monthly basis.
The number of property demolitions and the pace of office conversions into residential buildings are accelerating. Developers, meanwhile, have greatly slowed new office construction because of questions about future tenant demand. As a result, the amount of office supply in the U.S. is on pace this year to contract for the first time in a quarter of a century.
The Yale endowment plans to offload about $2.5 billion of private equity stakes. Secondhand buyers had considered valuing pieces of the portfolio at a 15% haircut, though the overall discount is expected to be less than 10%.
US trade deficit fell to $61.6B in April, the lowest since Sept. 2023. Imports fell 16%, with consumer goods down 32%, driven by a $26B drop in pharmaceutical products. Exports rose 3% to a record $289.4B, possibly due to countries buying before retaliatory measures.
Luxury hotels inside airports are having a moment. Affluent vacationers and business travelers are splurging before or after a flight in the same way they are paying up for cushier plane seats with more perks.
Private-equity firms are sitting on a record 29,000 companies worth $3.6 trillion, half of which they have owned for five years or more.
Pending sales in the luxury segment of the housing market have fallen to their lowest level nationally in more than a decade. Luxury housing prices were up 6.5% year over year as of April, and pending sales were down about 10%, that’s about three times the decline of pending sales observed within the non-luxury housing market.
