LightBox’s Fall market survey finds five trends going into 2024

LightBox’s Fall 2023 Market Survey has revealed five key commercial real estate trends heading into 2024.

The first is that the bears far outnumber the bulls regarding CRE market sentiment. 56 percent of survey respondents had bearish near-term expectations for CRE markets, while only 7 percent were bullish and 37 percent were neutral.

A second consensus trend is that property investment is expected to remain in limbo in the near term as investors continue to wait for a more sure economic environment to solidify.

A third trend is that survey responses show that distress is slowly but surely surfacing. Class B and C office buildings, in particular, are among the most common sources of distress, the survey found.

Such slowly surfacing distress segues into the fourth trend, that the coming wave of loan maturities is a top concern. Eighty-seven percent of the survey’s respondents said that they were either “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned”