Commercial Real Estate Foreclosure Recovery? Not By a Long Shot

Lately, I've heard rumblings that we're actually entering into an economic "recovery". With high unemployment and massive household debt, that's hard to believe. Remember, many people have financed their expensive lifestyles and the bills are coming due. Financial services, home-building, auto workers, even lawyers, brokers and other traditionally well-compensated fields are feeling the brunt.

Here's the mission statement for why we're in for a rough stretch of commercial real estate: everyone borrowed too much!

Not painting a pretty picture as well is the long-term impact of colossal government spending and national debt which has yet to be felt. Jobs just cannot be created fast enough to fill the gaping holes in commercial real estate debt-service. In fact, you can make a case for the first time in quite a long time, American's standard of living may have begun to fall - low wages, shrinking insurance benefits, bankrupt pension plans, and how about that 401K for retirement?

Where will the new high-paying employment options to stir recovery be? Here's a few:

• Technology: engineers and scientists still will be highly desired as new high-tech products can increase sales to global markets.
  
  
• Healthcare: as the population ages, we'll continue to see demand for medical services, doctors, nurses, therapists, caregivers, etc.
  
  
• Education: if there's one area that's in desperate need of qualified individuals it's the teaching industry, especially for education targeting engineers, scientists, and doctors for jobs leading to innovations in their particular field of study.
  
  
• Housing: as long as the U.S. population continues to grow (which it will), homebuilders will eventually recover as all these people still need places to live.
  
  
• Wealth Management: We'll eventually have to pay the bills for all the borrowing that's been done.
  

The problem is that there aren't many good paying jobs around right now and the only way out of a doomed commercial real estate market is job creation. Even those with the most rosy-colored glasses point to an overall gloom and predict a prolonged slow recovery process. I don't think we're there just yet.