Moody’s: U.S. Commercial Property Values Rise

Moody's Investors Service said today that U.S. commercial real estate values rose in April for the first time in three months.

Published on June 21, 2010

The Moody's/REAL Commercial Property Price Index climbed 1.7 percent from March, Moody’s said today in a report. Prices slid 16 percent from a year earlier and are down 41 percent from the October 2007 peak.

Economic growth in the second half of 2009 and first quarter of this year have helped lift prices for offices, warehouses and stores from an October low. Property sales jumped 50 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier to $15.4 billion, Real Capital Analytics Inc., a commercial real estate research company in New York, said April 22.

“What we have is a bottom in the market,” Christopher Cornell, an economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview. “We have seen essentially a flat trend in commercial property prices in the last several months.”