A Haunted Market? Rate Cuts, Layoffs, and the Fed’s Balancing Act

As the Fed trimmed rates a second time this week after a cooler-than-expected CPI report, trade tensions between the U.S. and China appeared to ease, the federal shutdown entered its second month, Manus Clancy and Dianne Crocker dialed into what it all means for CRE. With Chair Powell’s caution that a December cut isn’t guaranteed, major corporate layoffs at Amazon, GM, and Paramount sharpened concerns that the job market is losing steam, giving the Fed more cover for additional rate relief. The episode also touched on how CRE lenders and appraisals are responding to AI and the risks of leaning too heavily on automated analysis without professional judgment.

Manus and Dianne also dive into the week’s standout deals, from a promising $40M Chicago office-to-data center conversion to South Florida’s multifamily resurgence, plus LightBox platform data showing a dramatic 30% increase in nondisclosure agreements filed on property listings.  The market’s mood as we enter the second month of Q4? Confident, but not complacent.

01:09 Market Highlights and Economic Updates
03:58 Corporate Layoffs and Labor Market Trends
08:58 The Impact of AI on Employment
11:00 Hurricane Melissa and Climate Risk
16:30 Future Outlook for Commercial Real Estate
17:47 Data Dive: Investor Interest and NDAs
23:02 Development Deals and Multifamily Investments

Have questions for the pod team? Send them to Podcast@LightBoxRE.com. 

www.lightboxre.com

Transcript

The CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox
A Haunted Market? Rate Cuts, Layoffs, and the Fed’s Balancing Act
October 31, 2025

Alyssa Lewis: This is the CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox, a firm transforming the commercial real estate landscape by connecting every step of the CRE process with comprehensive tools and data. I'm Alyssa Lewis with our experts Manus Clancy and Dianne Crocker. It's the ending October 31st in a few notables since our last episode.

The delayed CPI report was released at the end of last week revealing that inflation remains cooler than expected despite continued high tariff collections. The CPI News triggered another round of US stock market gains. With the major indexes hitting several new all-time highs, adding to investors, animal spirits, the US and China appear to be making progress in reaching a detente in the ongoing trade war.

The shutdown in DC continued as the stalemate approaches the 30 day mark, and no surprise, the Fed wrapped up this week's meeting with another 25 basis point cut in interest rates. Lastly, we saw a round of corporate layoffs by Amazon GM in Paramount. Manus, quite a mix of headlines here. What do you make of it all?

Manus Clancy: It was a busy week, no doubt about it, and there were very countervailing winds with the news that we saw. It all started very positively last week, as you noted, with the cooler than expected. CPI report. We haven't seen a lot of data this month, so, and the CPI itself was delayed by a couple of weeks, so getting a piece of data and having it be as benign as it was, was a terrific start to the week.

You also noted that. The major US stock indices hit several new all time highs. There seems to be no peak, at least at the moment, for how high these markets will go. We saw Nvidia top $5 trillion in market cap, and we're clearly in a, we risk on. Period. More good news came out this morning when it appeared that following last night's meeting between the Chinese and US Presidents, that there was some sort of groundwork laid for an agreement to kind of turn down the heat on the trade war.

That was another positive for the week. We did see a couple of negatives, however, the 25 basis point rate cut. Was expected, no surprise there, but Fed Chair Powell came out and said that the December 25 basis point rate cut is no sure thing that set the markets lower. Yesterday, stocks had been in at all time high Wednesday afternoon.

As soon as he started speaking, those gains were given up and the markets ended flat to lower as people were concerned that the Fed might not be as dovish as they thought they were. Bond yields also spiked after that announcement, as we saw the 10 year go from 3 98 up about 10 basis points to 4 0 8 in very short order.

So a lot of positives early in the week, a little speed bump late, and as Alyssa mentioned, a lot of corporate layoffs this week. We'll have to keep our eye on that. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, I think. Like you manis my eyes were on Powell's commentary this week. You know, I was curious to see if he struck a different tone with this rate cut and I didn't see much different, you know, he, he continues to emphasize the dual risks of, you know, cut too soon and.

Cause inflation to flare up again, wait too long, and the labor market falls apart. But as you said, you know, he made it pretty clear that a December rate is not guaranteed and that it will depend heavily on incoming data. But the problem of course, is that incoming data will be patchy with Washington still shut down.

So he's gonna be flying a bit blind. I do worry about the labor market, you know, and I think the wave of layoffs that were announced this week from leaders like Amazon, general Motors and others, is really starting to sharpen the conversation around where we're headed. You know, I think those major layoffs, especially if there are more coming, really tells us what we already suspected that hiring momentum is cooling, and if it deepens, it would certainly give the Fed more cover to keep trimming rates.

Manus Clancy: For the first time in recent memory, it seems like we saw some big sell offs yesterday in US stocks. If you remember in Q2, I think it was 86% of all US companies beat on earnings. The news was almost unanimously positive. Stocks were roiling on positive earnings. The tariff news. Seemed to not be making a dent on corporate earnings, and the one that caught my eye was Chipotle.

Chipotle sold off yesterday. I think their stock was down 14%, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere between 10 and 14%. But the comment that got my attention was the CEO said, we're starting to see young people not spending anymore that. Young people had been the drivers of our market gains. They had been real fans of our food.

They had been coming in frequently, and that demographic, which I have to think is a big part of Chipotle's earnings, they kind of disappeared in Q3 and we'll have to keep an eye on that, is that the beginning of a trend is the kind of the 30 and under crowd. Tapped out, or is this a one-off? I, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Dianne Crocker: Or maybe they're shifting to fried chicken. And I say that because I saw a list of fast food places that are expanding more quickly than others. And it struck me that like three on the top five were all fried chicken places. So maybe it has more to do with the shift in taste than it does spending, you know, like that's tongue in cheek.

But I mean, the labor impact is real. There are so many headlines about young people having a hard time finding jobs. And companies who are using AI for entry-level positions where they normally would hire people. So maybe those concerns are driving a meaningful change in discretionary spending by young people, and I would put Chipotle in the discretionary spending category.

Alyssa Lewis: So let's talk more about the layoffs. Are these a real world sign of AI reshaping labor demand? 

Dianne Crocker: It's a good question, Alyssa. The one that came out this week that specifically pointed to AI was Amazon. And this was a meaningful cut, meaning it was significant. They announced that they're cutting about 14,000 corporate jobs.

That's about 4% of its workforce and. They specifically pointed to shifting more resources toward AI and cost efficiency efforts. And Target was another one that announced the elimination of about 1800 corporate roles. And they also cited automation and productivity improvements among the reasons for the cuts.

And then the third big one this week was from gm. Now they laid off 1700 employees. That wasn't. Due to ai, they attributed it to slowing electric vehicle demand and a changing regulatory environment. So, you know, I do think that companies are thinking about AI and its impact on labor demand, and these are maybe early signs of real impact in terms of labor force and labor demand, and it is concerning.

Manus Clancy: I think this is really the tip of the spear, I have to say. And that's not a good thing. The one thing that is the given. At the C-suite is meeting earnings expectations, right? That as long as you meet or beat the top and bottom lines, everything is okay, and if you don't, things have to change. Now, the two things we know right now on the tech side, we know that tech is spending hand over fist.

On ai, and it's not just the AI development, it's also the data centers. The land to buy the data centers, I think it was Facebook this week that said they're spending on AI related items or investment was gonna come in somewhere between 116 and $118 billion next year alone. If you know that earnings can't move and you know you're spending a lot on investment and you know, in some cases you're spending a lot more on tariffs, what is the one thing that is the lever you can move to make sure you keep earnings?

It's your labor force. And I think what you're seeing in Amazon here is they're overspending on ai. They're overspending investing in the next generation of technology, but to make sure that they continue to hit the bottom and top lines. They're cutting heads. And I do think that this will be, sadly, a trend that we see go on for the next year or two, that people will find themselves out of a job, largely because companies are.

Prioritizing meeting their earnings spending to keep up with the competition on AI and being impacted by tariffs, and therefore the fallout comes in the labor market. 

Alyssa Lewis: Manus, while we're on the topic of AI, I know you sat in on a banking round table this week. What were you hearing? 

Manus Clancy: One of the big parentheticals in the meeting was.

In the past, you would always know that the practitioner was practicing their craft, that they were exercising their judgment, they were looking for the comps themselves. They were writing up the narrative on the market and what's driving the market. You know, multifamily in Dallas or office in Chicago, things like that.

And now. As people are getting appraisals, they have to ask themselves, was this set of comps collected via ai or is the appraiser still exercising professional judgment? And that was a long conversation there. How do you know if this is just something being shot out to the internet, things being pulled back, or is somebody.

With gray hair and 40 years of experience kind of combing through these things and looking at them and really making the, the right call up and down, and I think that that will be a challenge going forward. If we don't get this right, then AI runs the risk of being nothing better than Wikipedia, where it answers some simple things at very high levels, but it doesn't give you.

The comfort that what you're getting back is a hundred percent accurate or well thought out. It's great for a cocktail party. It's great for learning something very quickly to to be conversational, but it doesn't get you there. The sweating the details is things like guardrails, is this accurate? What is your source?

Is it backed up by another source? Is it, you know, confirm data? And a lot of our conversation this week was around that part of it, that getting it right from. The starting line to the end of the marathon is really critical and what will separate winners from losers? 

Alyssa Lewis: Dianne, did anything else catch your eye this week in the news?

Dianne Crocker: Well, I think we have to spend a few minutes talking about Hurricane Melissa. That was obviously a, a huge story this week, making landfall in Jamaica and then, um, hitting Haiti. It's the strongest hurricane ever recorded. And if you were watching the news, you saw that it set a new benchmark for intensity.

So from my perspective, for commercial real estate, it's another reminder. A sad one that extreme storms are, they're growing in severity, and with that, their impacts on real estate in particular rise exponentially too. So that makes it a capital market story. And it brought to mind an interesting study that Bloomberg just came out with.

And what they did was they. Estimated that physical climate risk carries a financing premium. So the findings of the research are that companies who are more exposed to floods or storms are paying roughly 22 basis points more in their cost of capital for every 10% increase in physical risk. So what that made me think about Manus was we've got environmental consultants as clients at LightBox, like Holly Neber.

From a EI consultants, who was a guest on this pod, help their clients who are investors screen properties for climate risk exposure. So studies like this are meaningful because it means the market's finally putting a price on climate risk exposure. It means that. Companies could be rewarded if they invest in mitigation measures.

And we're in this reality where these extreme storms are intensifying. And because of that, there's an increasing need to really factor climate risk into things like appraisals, like environmental due diligence, like resilience planning. So you know, there's evidence that an asset's resilience. Um, to climate related risk could result in better financing.

So good work, in my opinion, by Bloomberg Professional Services on this one and anybody doing work in this area, I think it's worth a look. 

Manus Clancy: It's an interesting piece, and it's an interesting topic for many, many years, the environmental catastrophes that we saw, like Katrina. Really underscored the strength of the CRE market and the planning that went into making sure that insurance was in place.

So we saw something like Katrina, and that was our first example of a really major event hitting a major US city in the post CMBS world. And the big question was. Was the insurance in place to prevent bond holders from taking losses? And the short answer is, and it's not just this one, it's been several hurricanes and fires since that, we really haven't seen meaningful losses to borrowers in the CMBS market due to acts of God at this point.

So that's the happy part of the story. But the other part of the story, and I, and I'd like to read the Bloomberg piece. I haven't seen it yet, but you talk about. 22 basis points higher in financing costs that may be half of the cost that borrowers are actually seeing, because if you're considering loan A is 6% and loan B is 6.22% because of differences.

Location, yes, that's 22 basis points. But beneath the covers, if the expectation for insurance costs for property A for the 10. Is only 3% increases or 5% increases yet for property B, it's 15% increases. That's gonna have a big impact on future NOI and current valuation, which lowers proceeds and is another form of higher cost.

And so I'm curious to see what the Bloomberg method was, because it could be something where it's 22 basis points in sheer interest rate, but it's really 50 basis points in. Aggregate costs when you consider the insurance. Element of it and the fact that insurance seems to have no lid on it, uh, at this point in time.

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, it's a good point. Manis, and clearly insurance is in the driver's seat here and that's what's, what's bringing a lot of these concerns to the fore. I don't have the report in front of me, but they did break it out by global region as well as by industry sector. So you've got your nighttime reading there with the report and drilling into the details.

Manus Clancy: I will leave us on one. Positive thing. We've talked a lot about negatives. We've talked about layoffs. We've talked about the higher bond yields this week, Chipotle earnings and, and people not spending as much. But I do wanna leave with one positive, and this was an article and commercial observer came out late on Wednesday, Andrew Cohen, with the reporting and.

It's a generally bullish piece. It basically says the fact that rates are coming down, the fact that we're on a glide path to lower rates from the Fed over the next year is really leading to some nice bullishness among CRE pros. Many predicting a much, much. More active 2026. And that's terrific. I'm quoting one of the people there, Jay Neville off of HSF Kramer, and this is a, a quote from him in that article.

I think 2026 will be a terrific year for transactions. And that was kind of the tone of the entire. Article, and I think that's the sentiment of the CRE market, at least right now. Lower rates activity picking up in 2026, being a nice year for the industry. 

Dianne Crocker: Sounds good to me. Manas, you know, and I, and we've talked about this after the September rate cut, that obviously lower short term rates ease the cost of floating rate debt.

They improve refis especially. Those coming out of high interest rate periods, but that is the long-term yields that remain critical. But I think, you know, cuts and now we've had our second one, they do boost overall market sentiment. They do help liquidity. They're obviously not a panacea for underlying asset quality, but I think just that impact on assessment, the fact that we're in an easing cycle.

Granted, you know, two modest cuts, we'll probably, my guess is we'll have another one in December. But I think this optimism in Andrew Cohen's article, um, is real. You know? And I do think that it will be a nice tailwind for the market over the near term. 

Manus Clancy: This is a confident market. This is, uh, built on a strong foundation.

People feel good. They don't feel the market is over levered. They don't feel the valuations are frothy. And more and more, I'm seeing CRE pros use that term, that this is a confident market right now. And, and I love that that sentiment has really. It does feel good for 2026. 

Alyssa Lewis: Dianne, for this week's data dive.

I know you've been analyzing data from our broker and investor platforms. What insights are you finding? 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, listen, and I'll stay on that confidence track, Manis that you just talked about. So one of the metrics that I dug deep into this week is non-disclosure agreements that are filed by investors.

Those, you know, in my mind are a strong sign of interest from those who are out there shopping for properties. So one thing that we've talked about in the past on this podcast is we're seeing higher volumes of property being listed for sale. Across light boxes, broker investor platforms, and the average number of non-disclosure agreements that are being filed on those listings is a sign of, you know, who's out there kicking the tires, what types of assets are they looking at?

And what our data shows is that in Q3, the weighted average number of NDAs per broadcasted project in the LightBox platforms was 169. And that did run pretty even with what we saw in Q2, but it's notably 30% above where it was in Q1. And then in terms of asset class, uh, where are investors looking? Where is interest?

The highest multifamily, no surprise, is still sitting at the top. Their average was 2 21 per project, so that's well above the 1 69 average. And then retail and industrial are in a near tie for a distant second and third place with averages of 1 39 and 1 38. 

Manus Clancy: I have to say, when you pull back the lens, Dianne, that in addition to this confidence that we're talking about, if I'm an asset allocator, if I'm sitting at a place like a MetLife.

A new VE or a pension fund or something like that where you have your seeds planted all over the place. And maybe this, maybe a pension fund is not a good example because you know they don't speculatively invest in stocks. But if you're thinking about 2026 and you're thinking about, okay, the equity markets, all time highs seem very frothy, seem almost to be defying gravity, you look at the CRE markets.

They're not frothy. They're not overbought. You're still getting nice cap rates on the equity side. You're still getting nice returns on the debt side. I wonder if those conversations are taking place in the C-suite right now, which is, as we think about our 2026 allocation of assets, should we be more overweight CRE next year and underweight things like equity markets, things like that.

So some of these go anywhere type of companies. I would think that that conversation has to be taking place, and if it is the way people are thinking, let's put our money behind more stable, less volatile cashflow generating assets as opposed to speculative ones that that would provide another nice tailwind in 2026 for the CRE market.

Dianne Crocker: I like the way you're thinking Manis, you might be right. You know? And at what point does the market get too frothy to your point? You know, where investors start thinking, okay, well let's look elsewhere. And we are starting to see, I'll note in our data, more of a focus on, call them specialty asset classes than we've seen in the past.

So interest is starting to migrate away from, not away from, but. But less concentrated in the major food groups. And we're starting to see specialty assets, whether it's medical office type deals, and it could be because of the point that you just mentioned and just wanting to kind of look outside of those food groups and go where the interest is starting to increase.

Manus Clancy: I never like to give financial advice at all, and certainly I've been calling a top to the equity market since about August, so, uh, I was very, very early on this, but for me, that marginal dollar right now that that comes in, I love things like mortgage REITs, Starwood. Blackstone or closed-end funds like Nuveen, which are throwing off this 10% income right now and may benefit from lower leverage costs as rates come down, and terrific volume of origination.

So again, I'm no financial planner and I have my, uh, a long, uh, history of swings and misses, but for me, you know, CRE looks like the safer choice right now. 

Alyssa Lewis: All right, let's pivot to our, did you know for the week, Dianne? 

Dianne Crocker: Any listeners who were on last week know that our did, you know, was about the top three markets for environmental due diligence from our scorekeeper model, and they were New York City, Houston, and la.

So this week's did you know, is from our broker investor platforms, which show that most of the new deals that we're seeing coming to the market right now are concentrated in three states. And those three states are California. Texas and Florida, and that the most active MSA across all asset types is the Los Angeles Long Beach Anaheim area.

So on the basis of those metrics, I think if you're looking for deals in California, Texas, and Florida, you should have some good options, but you might have some healthy competition too. 

Alyssa Lewis: Manus, let's move into deals for this week. What do you have on the development front? 

Manus Clancy: We like to cut our deals into several different sub-segments, and the first one we'll talk about is in that development front.

As Alyssa mentioned, we are talking here about Chicago. This is the nearly 400,000 square foot former CBOE Global Markets headquarters at 400 South LaSalle Street. It was acquired for $40 million by. Prime Group and Capri Investment Group. I'm sorry, they were the sellers there. Uh, they made a nice profit.

They bought that property a couple years ago for $12 million and now flipping it for 40 million. This property, again, it used to be the headquarters of CBOE, is now gonna be converted into a 33 megawatt facility for. Data center use. So why did this one catch my attention? Largely to date, we have seen this data center work being done in Northern Virginia, in Arizona, some suburbs in the upper Midwest.

This is the first one I can recall in a major US city where we're gonna see conversion of a property really in an urban area. And. It's good news. First of all, we've seen these sellers here triple their money by selling this for this usage, but we already know that a lot of downtown offices in many major cities is obsolete.

We've seen a real rash of. Conversions from office to resi, but we haven't seen anything like this before. And should this grow and not just be a one-off, this would be a nice little benefit for downtown. If we could repurpose some of these major trading floors or former banks into something like a data center that would help absorb some of this glut of office space in addition to the resi conversion.

So let's hope this isn't a one-off. I love this story. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, it's interesting. Manis. I read that. On the heels of what you said, that they sold it at more than triple what they paid for it. And the way that they did that was by adding to its value, by securing necessary power upgrades for the building. And that the building already had a pretty robust structure.

It had high ceilings, it was well suited for this type of conversion. But what a cool way to kind of take maybe a struggling office asset and repurpose it for what's probably the hottest asset class in commercial. Of real estate, which is data centers. 

Manus Clancy: We did have a couple more development stories. I'll run through them quickly.

This next one, Jennifer Thomas was reporting, she's from the Charlotte Business Journal, by the way, that Hines acquired the 48 acre Brookdale Village. This is a. 48 acre mixed use community in Huntersville. And what Heinz plans to do is come in and add to both the office and residential space. So this property had been owned by Nuveen and Jamestown Heinz coming in, paying almost $300 million for the asset.

And it just goes to show that. These certain types of offices, these ones that are combined with amenities here you have residential, lifestyle and office still command a nice premium price in certain markets and he or Heinz making a bet that they can expand upon what is already a really nice location and add more residential and more office.

And my third one to give us some geographic. Diversity. Brian Bandel. He writes for the South Florida Business Journal. I've been doing podcasts for five years and I always follow Brian Bandel with the term the hardest working reporter in South Florida. Brian breaks so many stories in that market and when he's not breaking stories, he writes novels.

So in this particular case, he broke the story about Miami Beach Rally Hotel. Site, Michael Chavet, uh, selling that for 270 million. He had planned a $1 billion Rosewood hotel there and now a new owner will come in and take that project over. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, I had rad Manus that this is this iconic art deco landmark and there are so many down there.

And to your point, you know, he had planned a $1 billion renovation, but it stalled because of the rising interest rates and because of financial pressure. So it'll be interesting to see if somebody comes in and kind of refurbishes it. I love seeing those. 

Alyssa Lewis: Okay, Dianne, let's transition over to multifamily. What are you seeing in the news? 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, so in the day to dive, we talked about multifamily still sitting out the top of the pile, and in one of the deals that we saw this week, TA Realty a. Bought a 476 unit apartment complex in Palm Beach Gardens for 193 million. This story came from the Real Deal reporter, Lydia Kova, and in this TA Realty assumed the seller, which was Blackstone, the existing $109 million.

Freddie Mac loan, which is a pretty common practice with rates being as high as they are, and this, you know, really signifies a continued increase in multi-family investment sales in South Florida, which had really struggled last year. But South Florida is seeing an uptick in real estate deals this year, and this is just.

One example, but it was interesting Manis. As I looked at this story, it kind of made my head spin because TA Realty, I think I read, had owned it and then sold it to Blackstone in 2017 for 104 million, and now has effectively bought it back at nearly double that price. 

Manus Clancy: Yes, that's one of those, uh, I guess you had seller's remorse, right?

They had something great going on there and a couple years later they said, we gotta get this asset back, paying nearly 200 million for that property. So good to see them back in that market. And it's not their first purchase down there. They've been active in that market and, uh, really growing their portfolio.

Dianne Crocker: And then another story, a multi-family man that caught our eye. Um, this one came from Multi-Housing News, Claudia Utcu. It involves Greystar and Blackstone trading nearly 1000 units. And in this particular deal, Greystar acquired three assets totaling 988 units. They are in Colorado and North Carolina, and Blackstone sold this trio of properties for an aggregate price of 218.6 million PM issued $102 million Fannie May loan, and two Freddie Mac notes that totaled 66 million.

So two of the properties are in Charlotte, which is a very hot multi-family market right now, and the other is in Colorado. These headlines really reinforce what we're seeing across light boxes, platforms that multifamilies driving the biggest deals. Big names like Blackstone continue to recycle assets, sell some, and invest in others.

And Greystar is an example of an investor that's really leaning into sizable acquisitions where the numbers make sense. What do you think Manis? 

Manus Clancy: I agree. I think that the multifamily segment is the dog that's always hunting. People are always on the prowl for assets of all qualities, A, B, and C every single month.

That market seems to top the previous month's sales numbers. The buying pool is diverse. Every geography seems to see a lot of activity month over month, so it is a. Market that is really firing on all eight cylinders. But I did wanna bring up a small data point that I looked at this week when I was looking at recent sales, just to put some things in context.

People have talked about buyer's remorse and losses that took place in multifamily, largely from syndicators. At the peak of the market in 2021, early 2022, and debt left. Unattainable rent growth expectations, higher debt service costs as interest rates went up and the inability to fund their business plans that they had to rely on capital calls to extend their loans, to buy interest rate caps, and to complete their renovations.

That led to a real spike in delinquencies as Mike Haas has reported repeatedly in his C-R-E-C-L-O data. You know that market has double digit. Delinquencies at this point, and that's the negative side of the multifamily market. But the other side of the coin is people who bought in the late teens have really seen some nice returns, and then that goes under reported.

And I saw 3 1 3 soils this week that just underscored this in Lakewood, Colorado. Silver Reef Apartments sold for a hundred million dollars. $240,000 per unit, a 27% uptick from 2016 in Charlotte. The Loft, 1 35 apartments, 94,315,000 per unit. An uptick of 21% from 2019. And in Aurora, Illinois, the Aurora at Summerfield, if I'm reading this correctly, 88 million.

For a 370 unit complex, $240,000 per unit, an uptick of 58% from 2019. So we do deal with a lot of negative headlines in terms of valuations from multifamily at times. Just wanted to counterbalances with some real success stories on the other side of that. 

Dianne Crocker: And kudos to that team, Manus that's pulling together these data points for us. They do a lot of work and it's interesting to see these trends emerging. 

Manus Clancy: Certainly. 

Alyssa Lewis: We are just at time for today, but before we wrap, Manis and Dianne in the spirit of Halloween, share with our listeners what's your favorite candy and which could you do without? 

Manus Clancy: I'll let you go first. Dianne. 

Dianne Crocker: All right. I'll start with least favorite.

I was never a fan of the Three Musketeers when I was little, and my siblings and I would have these trading wars over our favorite candy. The Three Musketeers were always the ones that nobody wanted, and my absolute favorite are the the Reese's Pumpkins. My son is. A college freshman. So this is the first year that we do not have to squirrel away the Reese's.

Um, we can be an all out, not household. So the Reese's are on the counter and those are my absolute favorite. 

Manus Clancy: I am with you Dianne, on the Reese's. A hundred percent. In fact, we're very much aligned. I am also a big fan of Kit Kats. I think those are terrific. Uh, we may depart on this one. I do love my candy corn.

I wish that was a year round thing, not just a Halloween thing, but I think that for health reasons, it's probably great that it's only an October tradition on the negative side. I have to agree with you too. I think the Three Musketeers is miserable, but it's not the most miserable Clark Bar Butter fingers and those nasty marshmallow circus peanuts.

Remember those things, the orange ones? I, I think that those are the worst, and if I can give one piece of advice to everybody this Halloween. No fun, size, none of those little things that are the size of your thumbnail. Lean in, get people the long four inch Twix. You know, the packet of two Reese's. Let's make this a Halloween to remember.

Alyssa Lewis: Well, happy Halloween everyone, and thank you to our producer Josh Bruyning. Please join the LightBox team every week as they share CRE news and data in context. You can listen on any of your favorite podcast channels and send your comments or questions to podcast@LightBoxre.com. As always, thank you for listening and have a great week.

Manus Clancy: Let's go.