These past 45 days or so have been surreal to say the least. Global pandemic, overwhelming unemployment numbers, stock market volatility, stay-at-home mandates, Zoom everything, no basketball!
The current state of the world means that commercial real estate transactions have slowed considerably. Most investors are in wait-and-see mode and we imagine that they will remain so at least through June, if not through the end of 2020, if not well in to 2021, if not... Nobody really knows.
Small business owners - especially those that occupy commercial real estate and have been forced to close for the past +/- six weeks are doing whatever they can to stay in business. Even when businesses are allowed to re-open, it will not be a matter of opening the doors and everything goes back to "normal."
There is no going back to normal.
Like many other commercial real estate brokers, I have been calling and checking in on colleagues and clients, focusing on providing them with services and information, helping negotiate lease amendments, and doing as much to save the deals in my pipeline as possible while recognizing that most of it is out of my control. In other words, there is still work to do but more and more it is less and less transaction-related.
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