Original commentary written for Real Estate Trail, drawing on the transactions this publication tracks daily. Unlike the wire, nothing here is aggregated from another outlet.
A hundred days of trade coverage produced 147 conversion stories. Forty-five of them said which way the building was going. Fifteen carried a figure, and ten of those fifteen were lenders talking.
We counted every transaction headline our sources published over 100 days. Fewer than three in ten carried a price, and which deals stay silent is not random. The disclosed record is a biased sample, and this is the shape of the bias.
Five metros account for 57% of every market-tagged story our sources published this summer. Two-thirds of San Francisco's coverage comes from a single publication. Before you read a market's headline count as a signal, find out who is doing the counting.
Jean Paul Szita has transacted $2.8 billion of American real estate over 25 years. We sat down expecting a market outlook. What we got was an argument about debt, spreadsheets, inflation, and why he'll pay more for a building that lets him sleep.