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Sustained demand for logistics Prices are just as important as technology and demographics in explaining the shifts between retail and logistics in U.S. real estate markets

The Economist

U.S real estate is having ‘a good cycle’. It is a long one by any standards.  We are also seeing shifts between sectors. Single family homes have given way to apartments; but the way in which the retail has ceded ground to industrial and logistics is the biggest talking point. Technology and demographics are generally seen as the big drivers of change but there is a more basic explanation which comes from economics.  Behind the scenes, as always, prices are playing a part in reallocating resources.

Source: CBRE Research, Macrobond, U.S. Census Bureau, April 2018

Figure 1 shows market growth over the last five years of all the major retail product categories, in both value and volume terms. Values value represents the total dollar amount of goods sold (price times quantity) in a product category and is the normal way in which retail sales is measured in the U.S. It can be misleading when prices are falling as they have been for retail products such as electronics and recreation commodities. Volume represents the actual quantity of good sold. Figure 1 shows that volume growth has been much higher than value growth in many sectors because the price of goods sold in these sectors has been declining. In business terms, retailers have had to sell more items to gain the same level of turnover.






The Economist

About Richard Barkham

Richard Barkham

Richard is a specialist in macro and real estate economics. He joined CBRE in 2014 as Executive Director and Global Chief Economist. Prior to taking up his position with CBRE Richard was a Director of Research for the Grosvenor Group an international business with circa $10bn of capital under management in real estate. He was also a non-Executive Director of Grosvenor Fund Management where he was involved in fund strategy, risk analysis and capital raising. Richard is the author of two books and numerous academic and industry papers. In 2012 he published Real Estate and Globalisation (Wiley Blackwell, Oxford), which explains the impact on real estate markets of the rise of emerging markets such as China and Brazil. He has extensive consulting experience and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Construction and Project Management at the Bartlett School, University College London. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Reading where he taught, in the Departments of Economics and Land Management, between the years of 1987 and 1998.​​​

Articles by Richard Barkham

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