Don’t Take Away the Punchbowl – Markets, Momentum & Memorial Day

The headlines this week weren't pretty. The 10-year Treasury neared 4.70%, oil stubbornly parked at $110 a barrel, PPI came in hotter than expected, and equity markets wobbled again. Against that backdrop, Manus Clancy makes a contrarian call worth hearing: this is the moment to deploy capital, not run for the exits. With CMBS yields reaching levels not seen in years and bond spreads widening across the curve, for investors with conviction and dry powder, the entry point hasn't looked this attractive in years. 

The conversation also explores growing speculation around future Fed rate hikes, why higher energy prices are complicating the inflation picture, and whether the market is overreacting to a crisis driven more by geopolitics than underlying economic weakness. In Manus's words, the Fed raising rates now wouldn't just be taking away the punchbowl. It would be serving up a dose of castor oil. Meanwhile, the mood at ICSC in Las Vegas supports the thesis that the market has made its peace with higher-for-longer rates, with fundamentals backing optimism in retail. With new supply at a decade low, asking rents ticking up, and over $9 billion in Q1 retail deals in the LightBox Transaction Tracker, activity is focused on growth targets like open-air centers, grocery-anchored retail, and urban luxury. 

LightBox data and market reporting also point to a shifting landscape in office. Construction activity has fallen to a 14-year low while office listings climbed 35% quarter over quarter, setting the stage for a broader market reset. The team breaks down major office headlines including Miami office rents surpassing $200 per square foot, Nashville's second-largest office sale ever, a $1.9 billion refinancing at 2 Manhattan West, and signs that office-to-resi conversions are accelerating nationwide. 

The through-line of this week's episode is a market that refuses to be paralyzed. Low construction across retail, industrial, and office is tightening supply and creating tailwinds for existing stock. Capital is moving from metros like LA to Charlotte to Chicago. As we head into Memorial Day weekend, the market isn't euphoric, but it isn't frozen either. It's finding its footing. Stay to the end for a nostalgic Memorial Day Slice of Life featuring above-ground pool openings, dusty garage summer rentals in the Hamptons, and a few painful childhood memories involving castor oil and bars of soap. 

01:41 Bond Buying Opportunity
05:16 Fed Hike Debate
09:20 ICSC Retail Buzz
14:40 Office Data Dive
17:41 Miami Rent Shock
21:13 Deals Making Headlines
26:18 Development Bright Spots

 Have questions for the pod team? Send them to Podcast@LightBoxRE.com

www.lightboxre.com

Transcript

The CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox

Episode 98: Don’t Take Away the Punchbowl—Markets, Momentum & Memorial Day

May 22, 2026

Alyssa Lewis: This is the CRE Weekly Digest by LightBox, a firm transforming the commercial real estate landscape by connecting every step of the CRE process with comprehensive tools and data I'm Alyssa Lewis with our experts Manus Clancy and Dianne Crocker. This week we saw the 10-year treasury spike to 4.66%. Oil hovering around a $110/barrel. U.S. stocks wobbled with tech stocks hit especially hard. Pending home sales slightly above expectations. And on the heels of last week's inflation data, PPI came in much hotter than anticipated. A lot of ground to cover this week, Manus. What do you think?

Manus Clancy: It was not a great week for the markets. As most people know, if you sit and watch CNBC or Bloomberg or Fox Business with your cup of coffee every morning, it's been a bumpy last seven days since we last recorded. You mentioned that treasury rates are up again. We did see the 10-year get close to four seventy early in the week.

That is really danger territory when it comes to commercial real estate and the broader US economy. You also mentioned that oil prices, a hundred and ten bucks a barrel, is not trending in the right direction at all. That led to a lot of bumpiness in the equity markets. We saw sell-offs on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, and today again on Thursday morning, the markets seem poised to trade lower.

So kind of a sobering week for the markets led by those higher treasury yields. We'll talk about this a little bit later. We do think that, or at least I think so, I wanna get Dianne's take as well. I think this is a buying opportunity for bond investors, but for the moment, I would say the glass is half empty when it comes to the markets as we head into Memorial Day.

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, it's funny, Manus, uh, getting ready for today. A few weeks ago, the analogy that you drew for the market was Jenga. Last week it was bizarro market, and I'm wondering what theme you'd kinda tie around the market this week. But I did wanna draw attention to your weekly commentary on LinkedIn because you made what I saw as a, a pretty contrarian call, you know, that a lot of investors are seeing oil surge in the hundred and ten dollar per barrel range.

Um, as you mentioned, you know, bond yields are going up. We're seeing shaky confidence reads, PPI higher than expected, and that was on the heels of, uh, CPI data last week. And, you know, that might make some investors kind of head for the exits, but, you know, you're saying in your weekly that this might actually be the moment that investors should deploy capital, not run for the hills.

So I'm curious about hearing you walk our listeners through that thinking. 

Manus Clancy: Well, there are several tentacles there in the piece, so thank you for bringing that up. That's, that's very nice of you to, to lead with that. My first thought is that we've seen several interest rate spikes over the last five or six years, and the markets normally snap back, that we've seen a seventy-five basis point increase in the 10-year.

You can now get five-year CMBS paper with yields in the five and a quarter level, five and a half percent level, something we haven't seen in a while. We've seen some modest spread widening, which makes the returns even higher. When you move down the curve, when you get down to that BBB minus level, you're now talking about returns that are near double digits.

And in the past, this has been a really nice entry point. And my suggestion had been people start dipping their toes, that I do think that this is a very different crisis than what we had in 2023 when we saw inflation top 9%. That is something that takes years to wring out of the system, that the Fed fighting inflation, as we saw, took two years before they started cutting rates again, that we saw interest rates hiked From 0% to f- over 5% over a couple of years.

That type of penetration of interest rate hikes takes a really long time to reverse. What we're talking about now is more akin to the Silicon Valley Bank failure, that we were seeing an event. That case was Silicon Valley Bank failing. That led to a spike in interest rates and in spreads, and it became a really, really enticing entry point for investors.

What we're seeing now is completely driven by external events, by the war in Iran. This is not 9% inflation that is driven by excessively loose Fed policy and/or stimulus coming out of Congress. This is war only, and this can turn on a dime. And I do think that people should be dipping their toes, putting money to work, and I think that they'll be rewarded for this once the war ends.

Dianne Crocker: Well, I certainly hope you're right. And it, it brought to mind a, a phrase that Joe McBride used when you had him on the podcast, and that was kind of like that the market's had this spiritual acceptance of, um, rates being higher for longer, and that nobody's dialing back from the bullish forecast that they had for lending and investing this year, at least not yet.

And obviously the, the war is the wild card. And I do hope you're right. I will say that for the environmental consultants who attended our six roadshows, I don't think I talked to a single one that had dialed back their New Year's forecasts. I mean, if anything, they have ramped them up for the second half of the year.

So you might be on the right track there. I do wanna talk about rate hikes because there were so many stories this week about the possibility that rates might actually go in the opposite direction just when the market was hoping for some breathing room. And I know we talked about this last week, but this week there were headlines about the Mortgage Bankers Association updating its forecasts.

Now they're factoring in the possibility of a Fed rate hike next year, and they're not going out on a limb because Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, they're saying the same thing. And JP Morgan even got specific enough that they said that they expect a 25 basis point hike in Q3 of next year. So Manus, I recall you saying that a rate hike right now might be like taking away the punch bowl at a holiday party because the economy's already absorbing a serious gut punch from energy prices.

So I'm wondering if you've reached out to the new Fed chair yet to advise him against a hike. 

Manus Clancy: Well, we know that the new Fed chair is inclined, based on his public remarks, to be dovish, to cut rates. So I think he's on my side when it comes to being cautious With any kind of rate hike in this current environment.

It's interesting, you referred to the LinkedIn piece before, and when I first marked it up, I used the word foolhardy, and I said the Fed would be foolhardy to hike interest rates now. I later corrected that to be reckless. I thought it was a little bit too poke you in the eye to use the word foolhardy.

But I do think that a couple of thoughts here. Number one is when a US economy is surging, when inflation is raging, when the markets are on fire, it is the Fed's job to take away the punch bowl and to throw a cold blanket on the economy, to slow it down. What we have right now is, yes, a tech market that's on fire.

Yes, we're seeing chip stocks surging over the last couple of months. Sometimes it feels like the dot-com bubble in that segment. But we're talking about home builders that are miserably downbeat. We're talking about a US consumer that is concerned. We're talking about higher interest rates already.

Mortgage rates are now at a nearly one-year high. So if that isn't taking the punch bowl away already, what is? And I would suggest that if the Fed were to hike now, it would be not just taking away the punch bowl, it would be serving up a big dish of castor oil to this market, right? This is not taking away the punch bowl.

This is giving people something that tastes terrible. And let's not forget, this is all war-driven, that we are seeing a spike in oil, which is driving CPI higher. That is the reason that we're seeing these negative prints. The Fed raising rates now would just be adding fuel to a negative fire, and that's not where we wanna be.

Dianne Crocker: Our market is so fluid. Inflation's spiking now. Labor's shaky. The war's still going on. But any forecasts way out into 2027 are, are highly, highly uncertain. It's-- I mean, so much can happen between now and then. 

Manus Clancy: It would be a terrible, terrible move. But I will take a detour, Dianne, because you know I like my detours, and I threw out the castor oil-

analogy already. Certainly, people my age, you know, we just completely shrivel at the thought of being fed castor oil in a spoon when you have, like, croup in your chest or something like that. But the other memory of similar ilk was, I don't know, y-you were probably saintly as a child. I certainly wasn't.

But- ... getting your mouth washed out with soap, right? When you said a naughty word when you were a kid, and your mother said... That was a real thing. People talk about it like it's a metaphor. No, your mother put a bar of soap in your mouth and started, like, making you know that you're not allowed to use a naughty word anymore.

So two really painful memories from my preteen years. 

Dianne Crocker: It's definitely hard to imagine that happening now. I think now the punishment is we'll take away your iPhone. 

Manus Clancy: They'd, they'd call social services if I try to stick a bar of soap in my kid's cheeks. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Um, can we talk about ICSC for a second?

Manus Clancy: We should. 

Dianne Crocker: I read it's, it's the biggest commercial real estate conference. It happened in Vegas this week. I knew it was big, but 25,000 attendees is what I read, and we do have a team of LightBox colleagues there, including Greg Kaiser and Tanya Ball, and some of our clients are there as well. And the mood I'm hearing was maybe a lot more upbeat than what you might expect given everything that we've talked about so far.

But a couple really bright headlines in retail. Construction is down. Only about 4.7 million square feet of new space came online in Q1, and that was the lowest in over a decade. So with that tight supply, asking rents are up 2.4%. Not huge, but moving in the right direction. And Manus, I looked back at the transaction tracker data from your team, and in Q1 alone, your team logged over $9 billion in retail deals.

And the number of non-disclosures filed per listing on our broker platform, which I view as a measure of investor interest, is at 110 on average, and that's higher across all the other property types. Money's moving. There's a lot of differentiation by sub-asset class. ICSC's talking about things that we cover here in our deals, open air shopping centers.

People can't get enough of high street retail, urban luxury And the, the tenants who are driving most of the new store openings, restaurants, discount stores, groceries, things that on my mind, those are the ones that are recession resistant. You know, we still eat out, we still need groceries, we want a bargain when times get tight.

So I think the overall takeaway from ICSC is, is pretty favorable, and our data supports that. 

Manus Clancy: I have to say that it passes the sniff test for me, at least in the Southeast, that when I see cranes up and I see construction crews, for the last three or four years, it's been nothing but multifamily housing, townhomes, and single-family residential.

There doesn't seem to be, at least in my neck of the woods, an enormous investment in shopping centers, low-end retail, other than Dollar General. There seems to be a Dollar General popping up every week. But it does seem like that segment has been under-invested. Would you say the same in, in the Northeast?

Dianne Crocker: I think so, for sure. And at least in my neck of the woods in Connecticut, grocery retail is huge. I mean, at, at our town's kind of major intersection, Trader Joe's w- just went into an old deserted gem, and, like, the town was giddy. And that's the fifth grocery store within, like, a quarter mile. So I have to think one will not survive.

But I definitely agree with the ICSC feedback that grocery anchored is huge, open air shopping centers. We're seeing a lot more gyms open up, and very little construction. 

Manus Clancy: I was reading about ICSC this morning on the Real Deal. They did a real deep piece on it more about the vibe, not about the deals getting done, but more about what's happening on the golf courses and the parties and the music and who's drinking scotch and who's drinking beer and so forth.

And I have to say that it gave me a little bit of Michael Douglas Wall Street 1987 vibe out there. That for the last 15 years we hear that the late nights, the marbled steaks, the scotch at four o'clock in the morning, those are out, and that people are meeting at gyms and coffee shops. We live a-- lead a healthy lifestyle, and it's showing up in the way people do deals now.

This seems like it's back to the '80s. There's pulsating music. There's people on the dance floor. People are out all night. They said people were playing blackjack in the cabanas by the pools. It, it sounds like it's Michael Douglas all over again. 

Dianne Crocker: That was a great, great movie and, uh, a funny visual from ICSC.

But yeah, it's-- I mean, there was a lot of optimism. And I mean, think a few years ago when people were writing off retail, it certainly wasn't at the top of investors' lists. People were predicting the death of malls, which did happen to a certain extent, and that e-commerce was killing brick and mortar, but that hasn't happened.

I think there's a lot of really cool evolution happening in retail that's kind of merging e-commerce and distribution centers with, uh, retail stores. 

Manus Clancy: I think most of our listeners are familiar with Strip Mall Guy, a very prolific poster in the past on Twitter, now more so on LinkedIn, and he's always talking about the markets.

I know he's out there. He calls it the Super Bowl of retail, getting out there and And, and doing deals and so forth. But he's been posting recently on how hard it is to find deals, how there's so much competition for these properties, and I think it's of a piece of what you're saying, Dianne, that because there has been underinvestment for the last three or four years, that the people that specialize in these assets, and in his case, of course, given his name, it's strip malls, that there's only so much supply for people to go out and invest in.

And I think in his mind, this is driving prices up, and it's harder and harder to get the returns that guys like him want. And I think that does... that's a function of lack of supply. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, for sure. And he has a great follow on social. His posts are always really, really entertaining, and he's probably the king of the ball at ICSC.

Manus Clancy: I would think so. 

Alyssa Lewis: Okay, let's turn to our LightBox Data Dive. Dianne, what are you watching this week? 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, so I wanted to build this one around a study that came out by Newmark this week. They just dropped their Q1 office market report showing that construction has fallen to a 14-year low, and our own LightBox data shows that office property listings were up 35% in Q1 over Q4.

Now, Q4 was seasonably slow, so keep that in mind when you see that 35% increase. The point is, you've got a lot more properties coming to market at the same time that developers have essentially stopped building because it's expensive, it's risky. So that tells us a little bit about where office is right now.

Kind of similar, Manus, to what we were just talking about with retail, that the supply dynamic is shifting. You know, where if there's not a lot of new construction, it makes existing stock that much more valuable to investors. 

Manus Clancy: And I think it goes even beyond that. Not only are people not putting shovels in the ground to build office, for obvious reasons, we're seeing extraordinary numbers of People converting existing offices and taking supply off the rack.

There was a headline this week in The Real Deal that eight seventy-five North Michigan Avenue, which is enormous building in Chicago, four hundred thousand square feet, is gonna be transformed into hotel space from office. And this is just continuation of a trend that we really saw take root in New York.

We've now seen it take place in areas like Oakland and San Francisco, Los Angeles, and now we're seeing it in Chicago. And four hundred thousand square feet is nothing to sneeze at in a real trophy asset in Chicago. 

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, and it, it brings to mind a story I saw this week by PropMoto. They predicted that twenty twenty-seven will be the biggest year for office-to-resi conversions.

Projects that are targeting completion next year span twenty-eight states, forty cities, and many of those buildings were rezoned or financed or purchased a few years ago when office vacancies were hitting historic highs and developers started, um, kind of running residential math that worked. So I think it's a big year as office demand is lower and folks start thinking about new uses for these buildings.

Manus Clancy: When this process first started, there were a lot of skeptics, and I was one of them, that the math wouldn't work. And part of my thesis had been for about ten years, people were talking about old shopping malls being converted into community colleges, data centers, logistic facilities. And while that happened here and there, there was never that wave of redevelopment where we were seeing this happen hand over fist, where malls were just disappearing and new mixed-use properties were popping up every single week.

So I was a little bit of a skeptic in the office space thinking it's gonna be the same story. We're gonna be talking about it for five years, but it'll never happen. But it's happening, and it's happening quickly, and it's nice to see. 

Dianne Crocker: Dianne, 

Alyssa Lewis: let's shift gears and head into our Did You Know for the week.

Dianne Crocker: We're gonna go to Miami for this one. The Real Deal reported this week that Miami-Dade office rents have officially entered a new era, with asking rents now topping two hundred per square foot. So to put that in context, a decade ago, Miami office rents were just a fraction of that, and at the time, that market was kind of viewed as a nice secondary Sun Belt play.

Definitely not a first-tier pricing story. And then came post-COVID and migration and, um, an influx of financial firms and tech money, which I know we talked about a few weeks ago. And suddenly we have this new signal, um, that tenants are underwriting Miami at a level that used to be reserved for gateway markets like New York and Boston.

And Manus, we covered two nine-digit office deals already in Miami this year with the transaction tracker data from your group. So these are definitely signs that Miami office might not be a value play anymore, could be moving into gateway price territory for the right asset. 

Manus Clancy: Yes. Reporting there, by the way, by Lydia Dinkova.

I don't know what to say about this. You normally don't see any markets in the US other than San Francisco and New York with three-digit rent numbers, let alone high three-digit rent numbers, like two hundred dollars a square foot. Miami is certainly hot, not only in terms of temperature, but in terms of velocity of transaction, and that may only increase.

We've talked about this before, that in the Northeast, particularly in New York City, the talk is about tax hikes and driving businesses to places like the Southeast and the Southwest, and that may only accelerate the demand for office space in places like Miami, Austin, Texas, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, and others.

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, the great price reset continues. And by the way, there were a lot of stories this week about the phase of extend and pretend being over. So the expectation is that as that happens and that moment of reckoning comes to a head, that more office assets are likely to hit the market. Some distressed, you know, some not.

Manus Clancy: We had some debate on LinkedIn about this. A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Rich Bachman, and I made the claim that I thought that the office reckoning was closer to the end than the beginning. I got some pushback on LinkedIn from people that said, "There is so much more wood to cut than you realize."

And there is a lot of wood to cut. Let's not sugarcoat this. But the truth is that we've been dealing with discounts of seventy or 80% for several years now. There is transparency in the market. Losses have been taken, and in most major cities, we've seen between five or ten offices transact at distressed levels.

So I do think that the extend and pretend era is over. People are, to use the term again, taking their castor oil on these office sales. They're taking their losses either as lenders or as equity owners. The write-offs have been taking place, and I do think that we're a couple years out from this being over, that all the losses will have been taken and the market will have reset.

Dianne Crocker: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it makes it easier for all the appraisers out there who finally have comps to work with that they really didn't have, you know, three, four years ago. And I do see a theme emerging for this week's episode with the, uh, recurring use of castor oil, Manus. 

Manus Clancy: There we go. Painful memories can be the, uh, you know, the hook that gets people to listen this week.

Alyssa Lewis: Let's jump to the CRE deals making headlines this week, starting with office. Manus, what do you have for us? 

Manus Clancy: We saw several deals this week. We'll run through them in short order. The first one is a big one in a market that has been really in some ways similar to Miami, very a hot market for the last five years, and that's Nashville, Tennessee.

I understand that that's the go-to destination for bachelorette parties and has been for several, several years. That there, Highwoods sold a Nashville tower for $255 million. You don't see offices sell for that level very often, certainly not in markets not called New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.

Uh, reporting there by commercial property executives Luisa McClaus. It's the second highest office sale price in that city's history. Couple of other sales that you were referring to, again, signs of confidence in a couple of other markets In Manhattan, this reporting again by a commercial property executive, in this case Maria Marutto, Brookfield landed a $1.9 million refinancing for 2 Manhattan West.

This is a two-million-square-foot office tower kind of in that Hudson Yards area, which didn't even exist 10 years ago, but now is really the hottest office market in Manhattan. Uh, a third sale here, Vanderbilt buying a 1.4 million square foot Dallas office campus. This reporting by Claudiu Tiganescu, uh, the sales price, which was not reported in earnest, but it was said to be the largest in that Dallas market so far this year.

So what we have here is a situation, I think you could say that at least with these three stories, higher interest rates have yet to leave a mark on that part of the market, and at least here, for these three examples, the stigma of investing in office did not stop any of these three deals from getting done.

Dianne Crocker: Yeah, it's funny when you look at all three of those stories together, you know, Nashville, Manhattan, Dallas, I mean, each one made a headline because they're setting a new high water mark for office. I mean, the second highest sale price in Music City, and by the way, I've never been invited to a bachelorette party there, but I would love to.

The largest office deal in Dallas so far. Whatever the headlines say about office being in trouble, you know, these are signs, like the money's still there, and it's moving at record levels. 

Alyssa Lewis: Dianne, I know you had another story that caught your eye in New York. 

Dianne Crocker: I did, and it, you know, it connects to a conversation that we had, Manus, on this podcast.

It's going back a while, but we had a guest, David Putrino, at Morningstar, and David was quoted in this article about a vacant former WeWork property in Manhattan on East 11th Street that saw its valuation double to thirty-three million dollars. So it basically went from a distressed WeWork space to doubling in value, and David was quoted in the article saying, you know, this kind of jump is pretty rare, especially for distressed office.

But he's seeing it elsewhere too. He noted a, a property in Times Square on Broadway that was up sixteen percent since a 2024 appraisal. And his theory on why actually backs up things you and I have talked about, Manus. The Manhattan office market is heating up, and those big shiny office spaces, you know, Class A towers or what they call super talls now, are getting snapped up, and prices are surging, and some tenants are getting priced out.

And when that happens, they start looking at, at lesser space, which is driving up demand and eventually, uh, valuations further down the, the quality ladder. And it's, it's really an interesting dynamic. 

Manus Clancy: David and I are kindred spirits. I spent a lot of my life poring through data like he does these days, remittance reports- Servicer comments, CMBS data, which comes through every single month.

So there's ample opportunity to look at data in- for the hundreds of thousands of loans that exist in that market and the millions and millions of data points. He does a terrific job doing this, and he's spot on that this is the unicorn here. You rarely see appraisals go back up once they've hit the discount bin.

I'd say you'd see a couple a year, but not more than that. And, and his comments are accurate. 

Dianne Crocker: And it's interesting seeing the interest kind of move down from the Class A into Class B and even C, you know. And it's, it's the kind of story that points to the office recovery having more legs than people maybe expected at this point in the cycle.

Manus Clancy: I think that's true, but I think at this point, and correct me if you think differently, but I think that it is really limited to those cities that are getting the tailwind of AI leasing. And at the moment, it's a handful of markets. We'd like to see that grow into more markets, but until it does, I think that we'll see a little bit of bifurcation, that recovery will happen faster in those that have the AI bid versus those that don't.

Alyssa Lewis: True. You know, New York City, San Francisco, we've talked about that a lot. Good point. Manus, let's close out this segment with development and leasing stories that caught your attention this week. 

Manus Clancy: I have a couple here, and as our listeners know, I can't help but every week at least run through a few glass half full stories that show that the market is functioning, that liquidity still exists, and that deals are getting done.

And in no particular order, here we go. Cypress Equity has landed a one hundred and seventy million dollar construction loan to be used for new Santa Monica apartments. Several firms in that area now are investing, even though rents have been dropping off in the Santa Monica area. Cypress Equity putting a shovel in the ground there and a bank or a PE firm giving them a hundred and seventy million dollars to do so.

So a vote of confidence in Southern California. In Koreatown, in Los Angeles, Jameson landed a sixty million dollar construction financing for, wait for it here, a new office. How often do you see a lender put sixty million dollars on the line for a new office asset in a market that's not San Francisco or New York?

So another leap of faith there. And lastly, in Los Angeles, again, the Omni Group is planning to move forward with a new project. It will be a total of twenty-six hundred units, almost sixty thousand square feet of retail space at the Wilshire Courtyard complex. 

Dianne Crocker: That's a lot of capital moving into one market at one time, Manus.

And LA's, it's, I mean, it's such a complex market. And to your point, I mean, despite rent growth challenges, lenders and developers still have conviction in LA even for office, you know, as you mentioned with that second story. And obviously LA, coastal California, you know, from a broader perspective, demand for housing is so high, and there's really an extreme housing shortage.

So we're seeing more and more projects that have a residential component, and that last story is evidence of that. 

Alyssa Lewis: All right. Before we wrap, for our Slice of Life with Memorial Day weekend here, Dianne, Manus, why don't you share with our listeners your favorite Memorial Day memory? 

Dianne Crocker: I'll jump in first, Manus.

It's, uh, it's not exactly glamorous, but growing up Memorial Day always meant one thing in our house, and that was that the cover of the above ground pool came off. And if you had one of those as a kid, you know what I'm talking about. You know that the first peek underneath was this like gross murky water, leaves from last fall.

It was just disgusting. And somehow my brother, sister, and I were still excited about it because we knew it, it meant one thing. It meant that the end of school was around the corner. So Manus, you have a story for everything. I have a sneaking suspicion that you have a less gross Memorial Day memory to share with our listeners.

Let's hear it. 

Manus Clancy: It might be in the same vein. I'll let our listeners decide. But in my 20s, and I think it's still the case, that the place to be in the summer was the Hamptons in New York. And if you could afford it, you would get on that Long Island Rail Road, you would have a rental place for the summer.

You would pay a fortune to be out there to take advantage of the beaches and the bars and everything else. And in my case, I was not a guy who had any money at the time, nor was my buddy Pete. And we finagled a situation where we rented a garage to sleep in for $400 a month on two musty couches. So we would schlep out there on Long Island Rail Road, a three-hour ride.

We would pull our sleeping bags into a garage. We would sleep on one of those couches where when you sat down you'd see a big puff dust come out of. And because it was the summer and we were in a garage, it would be 110 degrees out there. But whatever it meant to go to, uh, you know, the beach every Saturday and Sunday and, and hang out at the nightclubs and so forth, it was a very, very fond memory for us.

Dianne Crocker: We are gearing up for our 100th episode in, in a few weeks, and we have a special guest in our LightBox CEO, Eric Frank, who's joining us, and we're excited about that. So stay tuned for that episode. 

Alyssa Lewis: Thanks, Dianne. Our 100th episode with Eric Frank will be out on Friday, June 5th, so stay tuned. And with that, we'll close.

Thank you to our producers at Bruyning Media. Be sure to join us each week as we break down CRE news and data in context. You can listen on all your favorite podcast platforms and send your comments or questions to podcast@lightboxre.com. As always, thank you for listening and have a great weekend.

Manus Clancy: Let's go