A slowdown in commercial real estate lending continued in the first quarter, due to stress in the banking system and financial market volatility, according to the latest research from CBRE.
The CBRE Lending Momentum Index, which tracks the pace of CBRE-originated commercial loan closings in the U.S., declined by 33% from the fourth quarter of 2022 and 53.5% when compared with the strong loan volume of a year earlier.
“The Federal Reserve’s commitment to reduce inflation with aggressive rate hikes continued to heighten market uncertainty through the first quarter. While plenty of debt capital remains available, increased borrowing costs coupled with credit tightening continues to put downward pressure on lending activity,” Rachel Vinson, President of Debt & Structured Finance, U.S. for Capital Markets at CBRE, said in a release. “Borrowers will continue to opt for shorter-term, fixed-rate debt with shortened call protection until volatility begins to normalize.”
The report also traced trends in the four different sectors of lenders, including banks, life insurance companies, alternative lenders, and commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS).
Despite some high-profile failures, banks had the largest share of CBRE’s non-agency loan closings for the fourth consecutive quarter at 41.1%—down from 58% in Q4 2022. This was driven by a diverse set of smaller local and regional banks, as well as credit unions. About one-third of bank loans were for construction projects, the majority of which were multifamily. The remainder was split between acquisition loans and refinancings.
Life companies were the second-most active lending group in Q1 2023 with 23% of closed non-agency loans—slightly above their Q4 2023 share. Loan closings in Q1 2023 included a high proportion of five-year deals, with an overall average loan-to-value ratio (LTV) of 52%.
Alternative lenders, such as debt funds and mortgage REITs, accounted for 20.2% of loan closings in Q1 2023, close to their Q4 2022 share. Higher spreads and interest rate cap costs created a challenging environment for financing floating-rate bridge loans. Collateralized loan obligation (CLO) issuance was limited to two deals totaling $1.1 billion in Q1 2023, compared with a total of $15.2 billion in Q1 2022.
CMBS conduit loans accounted for 15.7% of non-agency loan volume in Q1 2023—up from 2% in Q4 2022. Industrywide CMBS origination volume was limited to $5.9 billion in Q1 2023, down from $29.1 billion in Q1 2022.
As another potential strike looms at East and Gulf coast ports, nervous retailers are calling on dockworkers union the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) to reach an agreement with port management group the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) before their current labor contract expires on January 15.
The latest call for a quick solution came from the American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA), which cheered President-elect Donald Trump for his published comments yesterday indicating that he supports the 45,000 dockworkers’ opposition to increased automation for handling shipping containers.
In response, AAFA’s president and CEO, Steve Lamar, issued a statement urging both sides to avoid the major disruption to the American economy that could be caused by a protracted strike. "We urge the ILA to formally return to the negotiating table to finalize a contract with USMX that builds on the well-deserved tentative agreement of a 61.5 percent salary increase. Like our messages to President Biden, we urge President-elect Trump to continue his work to strengthen U.S. docks — by meeting with USMX and continuing work with the ILA — to secure a deal before the January 15 deadline with resolution on the issue of automation,” Lamar said.
While the East and Gulf ports are currently seeing a normal December calm post retail peak and prior to the Lunar New Year, the U.S. West Coast ports are still experiencing significant import volumes, the ITS report said. That high volume may be the result of inventory being pulled forward due to market apprehension about potential tariffs that could come with the beginning of the Trump administration, as well as retailers already compensating for the potential port strike.
“The volumes coming from Asia on the trans-Pacific trade routes are not overwhelming the supply of capacity as spot rates at origin are not being pushed higher,” Paul Brashier, Vice President of Global Supply Chain for ITS Logistics, said in a release. “For the time being, everything seems balanced. That said, if the US West Coast continues to be a release valve for a potential ILA strike supply chain disruption, there is a high risk that both West Coast Port and Rail operations could become overwhelmed.”
Global forklift sales have slumped in 2024, falling short of initial forecasts as a result of the struggling economy in Europe and the slow release of project funding in the U.S., a report from market analyst firm Interact Analysis says.
In response, the London-based firm has reduced its shipment forecast for the year to rise just 0.3%, although it still predicts consistent growth of around 4-5% out to 2034.
The “bleak” figures come as the European economy has stagnated during the second half of 2024, with two of the leading industry sectors for forklifts - automotive and logistics – struggling. In addition, order backlogs from the pandemic have now been absorbed, so order volumes for the global forklift market will be slightly lower than shipment volumes over the next few years, Interact Analysis said.
On a more positive note, 3 million forklifts are forecast to be shipped per year by 2031 as enterprises are forced to reduce their dependence on manual labor. Interact Analysis has observed that major forklift OEMs are continuing with their long-term expansion plans, while other manufacturers that are affected by demand fluctuations are much more cautious with spending on automation projects.
At the same time, the forklift market is seeing a fundamental shift in power sources, with demand for Li-ion battery-powered forklifts showing a growth rate of over 10% while internal combustion engine (ICE) demand shrank by 1% and lead-acid battery-powered forklift fell 7%.
And according to Interact Analysis, those trends will continue, with the report predicting that ICE annual market demand will shrink over 20% from 670,000 units in 2024 to a projected 500,000 units by 2034. And by 2034, Interact Analysis predicts 81% of fully electric forklifts will be powered by li-ion batteries.
The reasons driving that shift include a move in Europe to cleaner alternatives to comply with environmental policies, and a swing in the primary customer base for forklifts from manufacturing to logistics and warehousing, due to the rise of e-commerce. Electric forklift demand is also growing in emerging markets, but for different reasons—labor costs are creating a growing need for automation in factories, especially in China, India, and Eastern Europe. And since lithium-ion battery production is primarily based in Asia, the average cost of equipping forklifts with li-ion batteries is much lower than the rest of the world.
Companies in every sector are converting assets from fossil fuel to electric power in their push to reach net-zero energy targets and to reduce costs along the way, but to truly accelerate those efforts, they also need to improve electric energy efficiency, according to a study from technology consulting firm ABI Research.
In fact, boosting that efficiency could contribute fully 25% of the emissions reductions needed to reach net zero. And the pursuit of that goal will drive aggregated global investments in energy efficiency technologies to grow from $106 Billion in 2024 to $153 Billion in 2030, ABI said today in a report titled “The Role of Energy Efficiency in Reaching Net Zero Targets for Enterprises and Industries.”
ABI’s report divided the range of energy-efficiency-enhancing technologies and equipment into three industrial categories:
Commercial Buildings – Network Lighting Control (NLC) and occupancy sensing for automated lighting and heating; Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based energy management; heat-pumps and energy-efficient HVAC equipment; insulation technologies
Manufacturing Plants – Energy digital twins, factory automation, manufacturing process design and optimization software (PLM, MES, simulation); Electric Arc Furnaces (EAFs); energy efficient electric motors (compressors, fans, pumps)
“Both the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP) continue to insist on the importance of energy efficiency,” Dominique Bonte, VP of End Markets and Verticals at ABI Research, said in a release. “At COP 29 in Dubai, it was agreed to commit to collectively double the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements from around 2% to over 4% every year until 2030, following recommendations from the IEA. This complements the EU’s Energy Efficiency First (EE1) Framework and the U.S. 2022 Inflation Reduction Act in which US$86 billion was earmarked for energy efficiency actions.”
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The new "Amazon Nova" AI tools can use basic prompts--like "a dinosaur sitting in a teacup"--to create outputs in text, images, or video.
Benefits for Amazon's customers--who include marketplace retailers and logistics services customers, as well as companies who use its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform and the e-commerce shoppers who buy goods on the website--will include generative AI (Gen AI) solutions that offer real-world value, the company said.
The launch is based on “Amazon Nova,” the company’s new generation of foundation models, the company said in a blog post. Data scientists use foundation models (FMs) to develop machine learning (ML) platforms more quickly than starting from scratch, allowing them to create artificial intelligence applications capable of performing a wide variety of general tasks, since they were trained on a broad spectrum of generalized data, Amazon says.
The new models are integrated with Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that makes FMs from AI companies and Amazon available for use through a single API. Using Amazon Bedrock, customers can experiment with and evaluate Amazon Nova models, as well as other FMs, to determine the best model for an application.
Calling the launch “the next step in our AI journey,” the company says Amazon Nova has the ability to process text, image, and video as prompts, so customers can use Amazon Nova-powered generative AI applications to understand videos, charts, and documents, or to generate videos and other multimedia content.
“Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 Gen AI applications in motion, and we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with,” Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence, said in a release. “Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, information grounding, and agentic capabilities.”
The new Amazon Nova models available in Amazon Bedrock include:
Amazon Nova Micro, a text-only model that delivers the lowest latency responses at very low cost.
Amazon Nova Lite, a very low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing image, video, and text inputs.
Amazon Nova Pro, a highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks.
Amazon Nova Premier, the most capable of Amazon’s multimodal models for complex reasoning tasks and for use as the best teacher for distilling custom models
Amazon Nova Canvas, a state-of-the-art image generation model.
Amazon Nova Reel, a state-of-the-art video generation model that can transform a single image input into a brief video with the prompt: dolly forward.
Each of those points could have a stark impact on business operations, the firm said. First, supply chain restrictions will continue to drive up costs, following examples like European tariffs on Chinese autos and the U.S. plan to prevent Chinese software and hardware from entering cars in America.
Second, reputational risk will peak due to increased corporate transparency and due diligence laws, such as Germany’s Supply Chain Due Diligence Act that addresses hotpoint issues like modern slavery, forced labor, human trafficking, and environmental damage. In an age when polarized public opinion is combined with ever-present social media, doing business with a supplier whom a lot of your customers view negatively will be hard to navigate.
And third, advances in data, technology, and supplier risk assessments will enable executives to measure the impact of disruptions more effectively. Those calculations can help organizations determine whether their risk mitigation strategies represent value for money when compared to the potential revenues losses in the event of a supply chain disruption.
“Looking past the holidays, retailers will need to prepare for the typical challenges posed by seasonal slowdown in consumer demand. This year, however, there will be much less of a lull, as U.S. companies are accelerating some purchases that could potentially be impacted by a new wave of tariffs on U.S. imports,” Andrei Quinn-Barabanov, Senior Director – Supplier Risk Management Solutions at Moody’s, said in a release. “Tariffs, sanctions and other supply chain restrictions will likely be top of the 2025 agenda for procurement executives.”