Working on the Industrial Numbers For the Inland Empire

I am already thinking of headline titles, which is arguably the most entertaining part of the job. It is also the part of the report most likely to be read.

So far I am mulling:

We are already in Hell,

End of a Year Gone Bad,

If you can read this, please send help,

If you build it, it will fail

Bonfire of the Misguided Vanities

Scraping the bottom of the barrel of demand,

Fear and leasing in the IE

Recession has lost its meaning, painful lessons to be relearned

Frightening belt-tightening

Managing the Decline Of A Once Great and Mighty Empire

None of these will be used by the way, sadly this is the only platform for my linguistic genius. I find it easier to write in a down cycle, the adjectives for fear, greed and descriptions of the collective flogging we all deserve come much more naturally.

Optimism is a forced habit for researchers I feel, otherwise we would be immune to risk and toss our hat into the brokerage field.

Are things really as bad as these titles suggest? Maybe not really. Nobody knows, which is why I am tasked with putting a smile on this ghost story. Nobody else really gives a crap about the numbers the way that I do, or is as intimately involved, and there are limits to the horrors one brain can comprehend.

The combination of ugly math and isolation is volatile trending to the damaging.

So I decided to meet with some of the other researchers at the "competing" firms.

I put competing in quotes because right now we are all in the same boat together. Even in the good times there was little to separate us. We are like foot-soldiers in opposing armies, more sympathetic to our enemies who share our struggles than the revolving generals that lead this suicide march.

Yes, we all share the same boat. And that boat is sinking.

The numbers are pretty bad, everyone can agree on that. They have some tricks that will save them though, Stater Brothers completed their 3 million SF center.

Colliers does not count that absorption since it is owner occupied. Like being a Jewish kid on Christmas day, this is a present I cannot claim.

Other than that, some tweaking of the numbers is to be expected and some liberties are going to be taken on items that might have been passed on in previous quarters.

Sublease vacant space, now how vacant is that space actually? Isn't it much more likely that the space is occupied, since the rent is still being paid? Hmmm?

And For-Sale only product, certain grey areas exist as to the vacant nature of these buildings, right? If these buildings weren't, say, occupied, then they would lease them right? So one could deduce that these buildings are not in fact vacant, but probably mostly vacant, or occupied.

And if the lease rate is TBD, then the landlords don't really have that building on the market then, right? I mean, if they can't make up their minds in this market, then they are obviously "off" market, catch my drift?

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximation, and the collective approximation, at least so far, feels like a bad dream without end.

Which is why me and my fellow researchers raised our glasses and announced:

"Here's to being a salaried employee during an economic collapse"