Notes From Our CEO

Andy Stetelman

CEO, President, SIOR, MVP

Pandemic Panic: In March 2020, we, like many in the CRE industry had no idea what we were going to be facing in the next few days, weeks years when the world shut down. Although we were deemed “essential” we worked carefully and in slow motion not to harm staff, customers and clients. By the end of March still under shelter at home orders coming and going, we saw a glimmer of hope. We worked diligently and landed one of the largest distribution entities in the world in Hattiesburg……..Amazon took a building off West Pine St on 63rd Ave, also the Miss. ABC distribution contractor purchased a pair of industrial facilities off Highway 49 North and we shifted to more warehouse/distribution. Also residential rentals and inventory absorbed pretty quickly for both sale/lease properties. Other concentrations of real estate, i.e. office, retail etc. started to have a little demand and glimmer of hope and we are somewhat back to our new normal in all concentrations of CRE. We realized the retail shopping experience that many like cannot be replaced with ecommerce and certain items cannot be sent via a wire.
We noticed when the stock market corrected in 2020, we had an influx of institutional investors looking at smaller tertiary markets and started paying premium for multifamily property and other commercial real estate. They competed with our local investors and caused cap rates to decrease, therefore pricing escalated. We ran out of descent multifamily inventory quickly.

In spite of the rising interest rate environment, the cap rates are not keeping up and cap rates are slowly creeping up and not quite where buyers are totally comfortable.

Because of the typical buy/sell activity there is a lot of 1031 liquidity on the sidelines looking for replacement property and having to often stretch the scope of the search to a larger radius.
If you have commercial real estate you are considering selling, want to sell and leaseback your building or even sell your business and CRE or sale leaseback, please let one of commercial agents be aware.