At Colliers we understand the importance of interconnected data, macroeconomic trends and anecdotes in real estate decisions. With that in mind, below are 10 items that have recently caught our attention.

  1. The first leveraged loan sale benchmarked to the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) was announced Oct. 5. Note that the London interbank offered rate (Libor) can no longer be referenced beginning in 2022.
  2. The U.S. added 194,000 jobs in September, per Bureau of Labor Statistics stats, but estimates were for 500,000. Recent months were revised upward, but a labor crunch remains. ADP figures offer hope for another upward revision, since it reported 568,000 job gains in September.
  3. Some retailers are beginning to limit in-store purchases of household items such as toilet paper.
  4. An estimated 500,000 shipping containers are waiting to be offloaded from ships at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which handle 40% of U.S. container imports.
  5. Several major retailers such as Costco, Home Depot, Target, and Walmart are chartering their own vessels to bring products to less congested ports to get stores stocked for the holidays.
  6. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index has increased 19.7% over the past 12 months.
  7. The Federal Reserve reported that U.S. household wealth, at $141.7 trillion, is at an all-time high. Aggregate U.S. wealth has increased $31 trillion since the outbreak of the pandemic. For context, U.S. GDP is around $22.7 trillion.
  8. Tesla, following Oracle, Hewlett Packard, and Toyota, announced that it’s moving its headquarters from California to Texas.
  9. U.S. auto sales are expected to have fallen by around 25% in September. A forecast of one million vehicles sold would mark one of the slowest-volume months in the past 10 years. Edmunds predicts that GM and Ford will post sales declines of +/- 30% in the third quarter.
  10. Three days this summer had more air travel than on the corresponding day in 2019—July 1–2 and August 29. Through the start of October, travel is about 23% lower than in 2019 and 127% above that in 2020.