Commercial Real Estate: When The Going Gets Tough…

Six days before Christmas, the Commercial Real Estate Women of Washington, D.C., gathered for its last monthly luncheon of the year in the ballroom of the Capital Hilton. Hundreds of architects, commercial real estate brokers, developers and bankers ended the year with a panel on the defining event of 2007 — the credit crunch.

“Where we used to have 20 bidders on every asset, now we have six,” John E. Duffy, senior managing director of the commercial brokerage firm Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, told his audience. “The pretenders are gone.”

If the commercial real estate boom of recent years was a grand opus, with millions of square feet of new office buildings being built, bought and leased. Then 2007 was the year the tempo slowed. In 2008, both the ongoing tightness in the debt markets and an expected economic slowdown is likely to result in more of the same, brokers and analysts said.