Banking Crisis Means Changes for Commercial Real Estate

October 1, 2008, 5:53 pm
Sushil Cheema reports from the WSJ:

Over the last few years, many cities have seen an explosion of bank branch expansions. With the current banking crisis causing banks to consolidate, many people are asking what will happen to all that commercial real estate space.
“It was a trend that the banks started five or six years ago to get back into the consumer bank line,” said Jeffrey Roseman, the executive vice president at Newmark Knight Frank Retail in New York, about the mushrooming branches. The banks, he said, realized that deposits are the “bread and butter” of their business, leading them to court their customers by making themselves more highly visible.
“Like any retailer, they thought ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ so they changed the way banking was done” by making themselves more visible to customers by adding more stores, Roseman said. Competition among banks for space drove up rent prices and drove out small businesses and even large businesses that might have fit better into those locations.

Please click on the below link for the full article....

http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2008/10/01/banking-crisis-means-changes-for-commercial-real-estate/