Signals and Sentiment—Markets Jitter as CRE Data Reveals Contrasts

Markets wobbled this week as investors digested a mix of stock selloffs, cautious consumer data, and jobs numbers that left the Fed “flying blind” heading into December. Confidence is uneven, with big-box retailers sending conflicting signals as Home Depot and Target trimmed outlooks while Walmart beat expectations. Homebuilder sentiment also remains subdued after nearly two years of decline. 

In this episode of The CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox, Manus Clancy and Dianne Crocker break down the week’s crosscurrents and what they reveal about capital markets and commercial real estate. From early signs of stability in lending and select office assets to surprising risks beneath Los Angeles development sites, the conversation offers a grounded view of where confidence is returning and where caution still rules. 

A volatile week, a divided market, and insights you will not find in the headlines. Tune in to hear how Manus and Dianne are reading the signals as the year winds down. 

00:20 Market Jitters and Economic Indicators
09:22 Data Dive: Oil Wells in LA
17:32 Office Sector Trends and Transactions
27:54 Student Housing Portfolio Acquisition
30:18 Thanksgiving Pie Preferences

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

www.lightboxre.com

Transcript

The CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox
Signals and Sentiment—Markets Jitter as CRE Data Reveals Contrasts
November 21, 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 for the week ending November 21st. Stock sell off begins. Home Depot and Target both cut profit outlooks, but Walmart beats and raises guidance. The delayed September jobs report is out today. 119 K was above expectations, but unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, and the latest home builders sentiment index remains subdued. Manus sounds like caution is creeping back into the market this week. Do they reflect concerns about potential recession triggers? What's your take? 

Manus Clancy: I would say the market has been extraordinarily jittery lately, and by lately, I mean over the last week since we last recorded a podcast, the equity markets have been nervous. We've seen selloffs in four of the last five days, and now we're at Thursday, the Thursday before Thanksgiving, and what we saw today was a real whipsaw in terms of the equity indices.

Last night, Nvidia beat on earnings. Talked about having a great quarter. Talked about the guidance being terrific. Talked about sales blowing out the door. That led to a three hour rally this morning where at one point the NASDAQ was up more than 2%. Fast forward to after lunch Eastern time, and what we're seeing now is the Nasdaq is down about a point and a half.

That rally lasted only about. Three hours, and that's a little concerning. That is a sign of a very, very jittery market. So what might be making it jittery right now? I think there's several things. The first is that despite the fact that the jobs report today was slightly better than anticipated, there's still a lot of nervousness about the jobs market.

In fact, the Cleveland president was on. CNBC this morning and talked about how people are holding onto jobs for dear life. There are other headlines today talking about how there's an awful lot of nervousness among the employed that job layoffs are gonna pick up. So that's part of what we're seeing.

The other part of it is I think people are onto on to the fact that this AI runup over the last four or five months. Was reaching euphoria levels and what we're seeing is a healthy bloodletting now that it's gonna take time for these companies to really start profiting from this. The spend to get there between data centers and programmers is gonna be enormous, and I think what we saw is people coming to the conclusion that just like the internet, there will be a day where people are minting money off ai, but there may be a lot of bumps along the road.

I said this last week, and I'll say it again this week. The job stuff makes me very nervous. The AI selloff seems like a healthy reaction to a market that was overvalued. 

Dianne Crocker: I think jittery is the right word. You know, it seems to me that this was another week of a mixed bag of indicators. Obviously Home Depot and Target.

Through Bellwethers, so they came out with outlooks that were more subdued than what they were expecting before. So that's certainly something that's concerning. The jobs report, obviously the headline was that the labor market grew by 119,000 jobs in September. But if you peel back the layer of the onion, the bulk of those gains were in the healthcare and hospitality sector.

And so I think the headline will hide the reality that other industries like manufacturing, like professional white collar services. They are shedding workers still, and that's why the unemployment rate continues to rise. So the reality I think that the market is, is coming to terms with, is job growth is slowing significantly, and I think that lends a lot of credence to the idea.

That firms are maintaining this. No hire, no fire mentality, and it's concerning. And I am starting to think as the December Fed meeting gets closer and closer, you know, in an ordinary year, the Fed would have jobs numbers for October and November in hand before the next meeting, and that's not gonna happen.

Yesterday we found out some of the October data may not even come out at all. But one thing I wanted to mention to you, man, is. Is I read comments by Fed Chair Waller. He said yesterday that he's doing exactly what you talked about last week, which is he's not flying blind. He's actually talking to folks at businesses like Target and like McDonald's to ask about what they're hearing from customers down in like the ground level.

And what they're hearing is that customers are very, very cautious with their spending right now and. That caution could put more of a squeeze on the job market. So I agree with a comment that Ryan Severino made on a podcast with Naop that I heard this week. I do think that at the December meeting, the Fed is much more likely to be circumspect with a third rate cut than they normally would be if they had a full deck of data going into it.

I think it's much more likely that they'll take a pause. On the December rate, cut and wait and see what they have to work with at their next meeting in 2026. 

Manus Clancy: In addition to talking about the concerning momentum or lack thereof in the jobs market, the Cleveland Fed President also noted that inflation is by no means out of the woods or beyond ticking up again.

So that would underscore your point, that perhaps a pause is in the offering. But when you talk about flying blind. There is a shortage of data because of the government shutdown, but there's also crosswinds, you mentioned before, home Depot and Target having disappointing guidance, but there's Walmart beating top line and raising guidance.

You would think that Target and Walmart would be kind of tied at the hip. You know, two different numbers there. The unemployment number ticked up today, the job growth, even though it was above expectations, kind of anemic. First time jobless claims dipped this week, and all of this comes in the face of the jobs number is really two months old.

So what good is that? And you had a lot of people either laid off furloughed or permanently laid off, maybe from the government. And how is that fitting into all these numbers here? How is that influencing everything we're getting? So. I don't envy the Fed at all. I think they have a tough job right now. I think it'll get easier as data starts flowing again, but just every headline you see just seems to conflict with the other.

And I feel like right now this weak economy is much more anecdotal than it is data-driven, and it does feel weak, and we could talk ourselves into a recession, but the data is really all over the place. 

Dianne Crocker: It's confounding. That's for sure. We'll see what happens. 

Manus Clancy: I am easily confounded, but this is more confounding than usual.

Dianne Crocker: I would say Manis. Add to your column of confounding metrics. The home builder sentiment came in for November and it showed that the sentiment is staying weak as buyers pull back. So it's at 38, which is still well below the break even level of 50, and that's for the 19th consecutive month. Why are home builders feeling worse about the market?

They cited labor market softness. They cited tighter household budgets. They cited elevated inventories as the drags on demand continue. So that's another indicator that doesn't really swing toward the optimism side, and I think that's another one that could be holding back the wind on sails a little bit.

Manus Clancy: One thing we haven't seen, which is a little bit surprising because the tone of the market is decidedly negative. Stocks are down home, builders are nervous and bearish crypto, which I don't really follow, but crypto is off more than 25%. We've seen Bitcoin go from $126,000 to $90,000 per coin. You know, that's an enormous sell off.

All of these things have a wealth effect, and when you see this. Kind of all at one time. It's usually a precursor for concerns about a recession, and with that normally comes a dip in treasury yields, but we haven't seen that over the last week or two. That 10 year treasury remains stubbornly at that four 10 to four 15 level where it's been for about a month.

So we're not even get the benefit of, at least we could say, well. Bad news is good news. We're seeing the 10 year treasury come down and that's your support things that hasn't happened at all. 

Alyssa Lewis: Mixed bag is the theme this week. It's crazy. Let's transition over to our light box data dive. Dianne, what do you have for us this week?

For this week's data dive, I 

Dianne Crocker: pivoted a bit from talking about our internal market metrics and it was because a really interesting story came out in Commercial Observer this week by Nick Tro, and it was interesting to me because it was about LA and it was about the fact that before the film industry really took off, LA was.

Historically an oil town, and what Ola said in the article is that there are thousands of oil wells that are scattered across old oil fields in the LA Metro, and they're sitting there idle or abandoned. And because LA is such a land constrained. Market developers are eyeing them in a way that they probably wouldn't if it were in any other area of the country where there were other options available.

If you're buying a property and there's an old oil well on it, you're looking at pretty significant environmental, financial, regulatory risks. Nick's article cited Joe Deha. He's the CEO of Partner Engineering and Science. I know Joe quite well and Joe estimated that going in and properly stealing and abandoning a well can add anywhere from 50,000 to $3 million per well to the cost of a project.

I was interested in the article, so I reached out to. Richard White here at LightBox and asked him, how many wells are we talking about in the LA Metro? So he tapped into light Box's Smart Fabric, which takes all of our property data across different data sets, and he dialed specifically into la specifically into data from the California Department of Conservation on active and historical oil and gas wells.

So Manus in LA County, there are 19,524 oil and gas wells and of. OS 14,202 are what they call plugged, which means they may still have environmental contamination, but that the well itself has been plugged. So some of these are being assessed to see if there's environmental risk. The other 5,100 are the ones that are potentially working.

So what that tells me is if you're looking at LA sites. With 14,200 plugged wells, you wanna make sure that you're working with a good consultant who's using accurate data because that's not a significant number. And the impacts of not knowing that there's a well on your site before you break ground can be very, very costly.

Manus Clancy: That's incredible. If I was on Hollywood Squares and somebody asked me, true or false, there's 19,000 oil wells in Los Angeles, I would've taken the under by a mile. I mean, that is just an extraordinary number and it's somewhat surprising that it hasn't become something that has stalled deals in the past.

That there could be that many. I mean, that's gotta be 10 times as many Starbucks as there are in Los Angeles. I would think so. That's a, a really interesting piece of data. I like this week's data dive and kudos to you and Richard for digging in that way. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, and Richard's working on a white paper on it, and he will pull in some maps, which when you see them all mapped out in an image, you really understand the scope of it.

Manus Clancy: You'll know we'll have jumped the shark. If we start tearing down properties to build up data centers to be run by oil and gas in downtown Los Angeles. You know, we'll know that the AI data center euphoria has hit peak velocity. 

Dianne Crocker: I think one of the topics that we've talked about a lot in the past weeks and even months is the office sector and just how bifurcated it is.

So for the, did you know this week I looked at the data from your team on transactions that closed in October, we tracked about 225 office sales nationwide for 56 of those, your team had prior sales prices. 26 of those sold for more than they did previously. 30 sold for less. But the losses were far more severe, averaging about 40 million per office property and the average gain was about 11 million.

So I think that kind of spread really underscores where we are that the best located while leased buildings are holding and even gaining value while others are taking major, uh, writedowns. Definitely a tale of contrasts in office and that data supports that. 

Manus Clancy: I think what you have here is probably adverse selection.

There are so few people who have had appreciation in the office space. It's probably limited to some very tiny geographies. Either things that haven't sold for 30 years where the basis is incredibly low or really, really highly amenitized offices. So I think if you saw things where everybody was forced to market all at once, my guess is that the ratio of losers to winners in the office space is probably nine to one.

Or higher, maybe 15 to one, maybe 20 to one, you know? But you do see those stories periodically and you circled them where somebody is, you know, able to catch a falling knife that they're lucky either because of their timing, their location, the money they put into it. We wish there was more of those. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, for sure.

And you know, I should mention too, that the distribution around those averages that I mentioned are very, very wide, like the range of losses was from. 20,000 to a loss of 180 million at the high end. So certainly every property tells its own unique story. 

Manus Clancy: Three things. When you combine poor quality of life, an aging building that's been allowed to go unimproved for a long period of time in a market where there isn't growth or return to office is very weak.

And I'm thinking places like downtown St. Louis, things like that, that is. The hat trick of bad news for office owners when you have that combination, right, class B slash B minus in a city where people are moving out because of quality of life issues and you can't convince workers to come back, it's a hard story to sell.

Uh, the good news is some of these things we've seen offices. In St. Louis that well once 200 million in value, that sold for 200 million, now going for $4 million. And at that basis, somebody could put in 30 or 40 or 50 million and perhaps revitalize an office, especially if they get assistance from a forward looking legislature in a city.

So the prices seem right for opportunistic buyers, and let's hope that that turns into a reeding of some of these. Left behind 

Dianne Crocker: Right. And I. Round of deals that we're seeing this year. Even though the dollar amounts are all over the board and the geographies are all over the place, is that each round of transactions brings hope to the market.

It helps to establish a pricing floor that we haven't seen other brave investors stepping in to repurpose office that maybe has outlived its usefulness, I think gives hope to other developers to move in and do the same. So I think at the overall. Theme is that it's good news that office assets are changing hands in a way that we really hadn't seen in the past several years.

Manus Clancy: It's really true that when you look at every, let's say top 30 or 40 US cities, there's been between five and 10 office transactions. They're not at prices that make you very happy, right? They're 70% off, 80% off, but. The one silver lining is you normally have transparency. You know what things are going for.

In San Francisco, you know what they're trading for in New York for Class B, you know what they're going for In Chicago. They're disappointing comps, but they're plentiful, and the risk that you're overpaying for something gets diminished and therefore your willingness to jump in and perhaps take the plunge.

To redevelop something comes with a lot more confidence. 

Alyssa Lewis: Manis, that takes us to the stories you've been watching this week. 

Manus Clancy: Yeah, we have a couple of them. One came in very late last night. I'll run through them, uh, quickly, both courtesy of Iron Hound, which is a workout specialist. They get brought in when borrowers and properties go sideways or negative, meaning the rents are not in place to satisfy the debt service.

The lender wants to foreclose, the borrower wants to work something out, whether it's a short sale, uh, a loan extension, some kind of modification, iron hound or others will come in and help the borrower work with the lender to work something out and extend a loan. So the first one we had is Bill Rudins, family owned property at 32.

Avenue of the Americas, sometimes known as sixth Avenue in Manhattan, Bruin's family managed to extend a $425 million CMBS loan for four years. The property itself is a 27 story, 1.2 million square foot tower in Tribeca. So this is the triangle below Canal Street. For those that are not from New York, that's where the Tribeca.

Moniker comes from, uh, reporting there comes from commercial observer. The second loan modification we had, this one comes from commercial observer as well. In this case, Kathy Cunningham with the reporting t Tera Organization just nailed a loan modification for two buildings on the upper East side of Manhattan.

The Yorkshire Towers on 86th Street on the east side. Lexington Towers on 88th Street. Also on the east side. Um, iron Hounds, Anthony Emilio renegotiated this deal on behalf of Chera. What was interesting here was the debt was about 540 million of CMBS debt, plus another 175 million of Mez debt, but it wasn't slated to mature until June of 2027.

Often when you're seeing loan modifications take place. It's at or after the time the loan was scheduled to mature. The borrower doesn't seek to work something out until long after the loan has kind of hit the rocks Here. What you have is a situation where the borrower got in front of this, and even though the loan wasn't to mature for nearly 18 more months, they managed to extend the loan.

Meaningfully a couple of years ahead of that maturity date. So two interesting stories here, uh, that showed how the process works, how loans get extended, and borrowers when they do run into trouble don't necessarily have to resort to deed in lieu foreclosure, or losing their properties. 

Dianne Crocker: Agreed. You know, I think I've read both of those stories, manis and felt a little better about things.

You know, loans aren't going belly up. Um, there's certainly a sense of collaborating. I think on the first story that you mentioned with the CMBS loan, the occupancy had slipped to 57%. Cash flow was down nearly 50% from its 2015 Underwriting. But you know, it was a sign the owner's staying current on payments.

They negotiated the extension early and they're doubling down on the property instead of retreating, which we're seeing from other office owners. 

Manus Clancy: I do have one more New York City story, which I found very interesting today. This was also A-C-M-B-S story, and this might be a little bit of inside baseball, and it's different from what we just described.

It's different from borrower and lender. Workout specialists getting together to cut a deal. This is a little different and hopefully I could turn this, what is somewhat dense subject matter into something a little bit easier. This particular property is one Worldwide Plaza at 8 25 eighth Avenue in Manhattan.

Here what we have is a $940 million CMBS loan that is tied to me. This particular loan here. Owned by SL Green and RXR. They were looking for a modification, but a foreclosure proceeding was scheduled and it looked like the modification was gonna fall through and the owners were gonna lose the property.

What was interesting last night, and commercial observer came out with this reporting, in this case, Kathy Cunningham and Brian Pascal was that developer, Gary Barnett of xl. He is a huge developer in Manhattan. He's done some of those billion dollar towers where people come in, pay a hundred million dollars for an apartment overlooking Central Park.

He has bought the Mez debt on this property with the idea of being the guy who can foreclose on the property, jump the line, and buy the property without it going to foreclosure. How does that work? The way it works is because the senior note is in defaults. The owner of the MES loan is given the right of first refusal to cure the senior note.

If Gary Barnett does so, and Exel development cures that senior loan on behalf of SL Green, they are now in a position to take over the property. This doesn't happen a ton, but it happens from time to time. So this is an example of some inside baseball among. New York City developers with Xcel jumping in saying, we're gonna buy the Mez note on this, probably at a deep, deep, deep discount with an opportunity to own the property in the future.

If you have questions about that, reach out to me. It's kind of an interesting story. Great reporting by commercial observer. It only came out last night and I just wanted to get into that because sometimes understanding the nuances behind these complex transactions isn't easy. 

Alyssa Lewis: Dianne. Now let's turn to a big leasing story in Southern California.

Thanks, Alyssa. Yeah, we'll 

Dianne Crocker: pivot from Manhattan to Beverly Hills. This story came to us from Nick tro with Commercial Observer, United Talent Agency inked a renewal lease for a 192,000 square foot headquarter space in Beverly Hills. They're leasing it from Diviv Co West, who has owned the property since 2018 after acquiring from Rockefeller Group for 236 million.

And it's interesting because this renewal comes at a time when film and TV production companies have been leaving Southern California at a pretty rapid clip since the pandemic. So this story kind of fits into a pattern of. Selective strength for prime assets, where best in class buildings and this one qualifies.

In places like Beverly Hills and Century City and Hollywood are able to still draw tenants when other areas are seeing tenants flee the area. 

Manus Clancy: Just like most cities, there's have and have nots. In that LA Southern California area, that Beverly Hills office, the creative office, the high end Amenitized office that has been immune from a lot of these downturns that you've seen in downtown LA and other areas, and people wanna be there.

They like not only the weather and the location, but the properties themselves. And this is a positive office story. I'll pivot it to a second one. Another positive office story that was collected by our research team here. This was back to Manhattan Mitsui Esan signed three deals totaling 200,000 square feet at 1251 Avenue of the Americas.

This is a Midtown West 50th and sixth of the.

A, but not a plus. A plus. You would probably call Hudson Yards. Now you call one Vanderbilt, which is around Grand Central Terminal. This building built 60 or 70 years ago. There has been a lot of investment in it. A hundred million dollars put in by Mitsui to up. The game of that particular property, the adding of terraces and executive lounges and new restaurants and so forth, and that has paid off.

They signed three leases, 200,000 square feet, two of them being renewals, and one being the taking of a tenant from another nearby property. The largest of those deals, 80,000 square feet from Trust Company of the West. Also known as TCW, they will be doubling their footprint from 40,000 square feet to 80,000 square feet at that property.

Dianne Crocker: And I read in the story that that brings occupancy above 90%, which is not too shabby for a downtown office tower. And the reinvestment that you mentioned, Manus. They used a term to describe it that I thought was interesting, which is that it's all part of the trend toward hospitality style offices. You know the ones that have the new restaurants, that have executive lounges, that have upgraded conference spaces.

So if you're the owner of an office property and you don't have that, you're definitely gonna be at a disadvantage because the record high leasing that we're. Seeing year over year in metros like Manhattan are led by Class A towers like this that are benefiting from reinvestment, in this case, in the area of $100 million, 

Manus Clancy: I would say, among offices and submarkets in Manhattan.

This has been one that I have been most concerned about for a long time, even before COVID, because these buildings are enormous. They. Seemed like they were playing second fiddle to some of the newer places like Hudson Yards or one Vanderbilt. I did worry before COVID about law firms and ad agencies and accounting firms flocking to Hudson Yards, and I was worried about these buildings.

Becoming obsolete very quickly. That concern really grew during COVID when I thought, if these law firms go from 500,000 square feet to 200 k, that could really accelerate. But I think what you have here is really the recipe for keeping these buildings vibrant and kudos to the owners for pulling this off because, uh, not easy, not cheap, but they're paying off here with these three new leases.

Alyssa Lewis: Dianne, let's jump into a big portfolio deal and student housing. 

Dianne Crocker: What can you share? Yeah, this was an incredible story. It is an enormous, uh, portfolio deal. It's in the student housing segment, which we don't often talk about, and in this story, Morgan Stanley and GSA acquired an eight property student housing portfolio.

It was valued at $1 billion. 6,200 beds sold to a partnership between Morgan Stanley, investment Management and Global Student Accommodation. This was a story that came to us from Leslie Shaver with Multifamily Dive, and the properties are across some pretty top tier university markets like Texas a and m, the University of Florida, Penn State, UVA.

The properties are nearly fully occupied, and that tells you all you need to know about demand in this niche market. You know, I think it's just. Science student housing is continuing to attract institutional capital. It's got what the office sectors and retail sectors by and large are missing, which is consistent demand, um, inflation linked rent growth, and strong occupancy, even enough slower economy.

6,200 bads Manus. 

Manus Clancy: Two thoughts on this story. One. Is of all my calls over the last five years since I've been doing podcasts, my biggest swing and miss was in the student housing segment. I thought when COVID started, nobody would ever pay a thousand or $1,200 a month to let their kids sit in student housing while taking classes online on their computer.

I was so wrong on that. That occupancy barely dipped. Values barely dipped. I thought it was going to be a catastrophe and it turned out to be nothing of the sort. My other thought on student housing, and I've said this before jokingly, but only half joking, and that is when my wife and I fully retire, we wanna retire to a student housing community.

Have you seen these things now? The outdoor big screen, the lazy river, the outdoor grills, I mean, they have everything. 

Alyssa Lewis: They're pretty sweet. Speaking of sweet Thanksgiving is just around the corner, so let's close with our slice of life in this case, a slice pie. Dianne, I know you did a little bit of research for us here.

Do you wanna kick us off? I really love this story. The 

Dianne Crocker: folks at Google took a look at pie preferences across the US with a map that revealed the most uniquely searched Thanksgiving pies in every state. So I'm here in New England and no surprise all of the New England states went traditional with apple pie or South Carolina Manus with sweet potato.

What do you think of that? 

Manus Clancy: I love my pies. I have to say there's very few pies that I find disagreeable. I have to say sweet potato pie in South Carolina big. But historically, I'm a coconut custard pie guy or a pumpkin pie guy. And I'm not lying. When I could say I could put one of each down in the three hours after Thanksgiving dinner if a allowed to.

Alyssa Lewis: All right. Well, with that, we'll close 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.