First-time buyers hit a record low share of the homebuying market last year, with only 24% of homebuyers saying they were purchasing a home for the first time — a substantial drop from the 32% who said the same the year prior. Meanwhile, baby boomers were the largest cohort of homebuyers last year, making up 42% of all homebuyers.
Morgan Properties, the country’s largest privately held apartment landlord, has agreed to pay $501 million for 11 multifamily properties across the Midwest, the latest wager that the region’s lack of supply provides fertile ground for rent hikes.
Furloughs in the federal government totaled 216,215 for the month, part of a total 275,240 reductions overall in the labor force. The monthly total was surpassed only by April and May of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when employers announced combined reductions of more than 1 million.
The 10 biggest U.S. consulting firms to the federal government have offered to cut billions of dollars from their contracts with agencies but face pushback from the Trump administration to deliver even deeper savings. Companies including Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, IBM and others met the General Services Administration deadline to justify their contracts and identify potential cost cuts to existing projects.
A near-record-low 30 million square feet of net-new retail was built nationwide last year, compared with 221 million square feet in 2006.
The prospect of a radical escalation in the global trade war in coming days has nearly doubled the probability of a recession in the U.S. economy in the next 12 months to around 35%, according to Goldman Sachs.
The Twin Cities again has the highest level of commercial real estate distress among all major U.S. metros. The Minneapolis-St. Paul MSA, had a 49.7% distress rate, which measures the current balances of CMBS loans that are distressed against all such loan balances. Behind Minneapolis, the metro areas of Providence, Rhode Island, saw a distress rate of 45.4%, while Rochester, New York, experienced a 35.7% distress rate. The overall distress rate for all loans across every metro was 10.8%, as of last month.
Dollar Tree agreed to a sale of its Family Dollar business to a consortium of private-equity investors for roughly $1 billion. Dollar Tree outbid its rival Dollar General to acquire the Family Dollar chain in 2015 for roughly $9 billion.
The average sale price of golf courses tracked reached more than $6.87 million last year, up 38% from an average of just under $5 million in 2023. The last time the average price reached that level was 2007, shortly before the financial crisis and Great Recession.
