Another report from the trenches courtesy of our anonymous commercial real estate correspondent…

This year’s biggest pure market disaster is arguably retail rents, off from thirty to fifty percent. Prime space in Dumbo once worth nearly $60 a foot goes for $37.
Smith Street from$80-plus down to $55 – or less. Back to reality is good news for tenants. Anybody with the chutzpah to open any type of store today deserves a break!

Liberal bank lending, which fueled the boom, now limits condo sales with absurdly tight underwriting standards. Old story – banks lend too much then they lend too little. When will they get it right? To be fair, the investment bankers, rating agencies and attorneys together killed the secondary market banks early on. Still, does water boarding borrowers help anyone?

Hard for tenants to resist when four large projects (Tillary, Myrtle, DeKalb, Lawrence) open at the same time. Great for DoBro, great for tenants, goodbye developer equity. Somehow living in high-rise full-service new construction doesn’t seem like the Brooklyn thing to do…. Could be fun though.

Area office rents, after dropping thirty percent, have stabilized. DoBro vacancy rate according to the four monster commercial brokerages that survey us, is lower than Manhattan. Take that small island.

Flattery Vs. Rambo….. Some have called the area bounded by Tillary, Jay, Sands and Prince Street RAMBO (right After the Manhattan Bridge overpass) when owners there tried to call it Dumbo. Broker Paul Murphy coined FLATTERY. I like that better. Let’s go with it. What do you think?

Prior Commercial Klutch Posts [Brownstoner]