Market News

Banks have announced more than $54 billion in deals through late September. That puts industry mergers and acquisitions on pace for their biggest year since 2008, when some big banks had to sell themselves to stave off collapse.

Overall, publicly traded U.S. companies own land and buildings valued at $1.64 trillion. That is up 38% from 10 years ago, and the highest for at least the past 10 years.

Blackstone Inc. has reached an agreement to sell the Cosmopolitan casino and hotel on the Las Vegas Strip for $5.65 billion, telling investors that the sale is the company’s most profitable of a single asset ever. The deal separates ownership of the property from the hotel and casino operations, which are being sold to MGM Resorts International for about $1.6 billion. Blackstone acquired the two-tower property for about $1.8 billion seven years ago and spent an additional $500 million on upgrades.

Apollo unit backs Hong Kong insurer FWD’s $3 billion U.S. IPO. Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li’s FWD Group landed a $400 million investment as part of the Asian insurer’s plans for a multibillion-dollar U.S. listing.

As the summer leisure travel surge subsided, the U.S. hotel industry reported August occupancy at 63.2 percent, down 11.3 percent from August 2019. Average daily rate reached $137.57, up 3.7 percent from August 2019. Revenue per available room was $86.88, down 8.1 percent from August 2019.

Homes sold in July received an average of 4.5 offers each, up from 2.9 offers a year earlier with about 23% of existing sold homes purchased in cash, up from 16% a year earlier.

Google said it is buying a Manhattan office building for $2.1 billion. The deal for the new building on Manhattan’s West Side is the most expensive sale of a single U.S. office building since the start of the pandemic—and one of the priciest in U.S. history.

Market participants increasingly believe that Beijing will let China property developer Evergrande fail and inflict losses on its shareholders and bondholders. The company’s debt burden is the biggest for any publicly traded real estate management or development company in the world.

Invesco is in talks to merge with State Street’s asset-management business. State Street’s asset-management unit manages nearly $4 trillion in assets while Invesco oversees $1.5 trillion in assets and manages a large ETF business.

Pimco also has become a more active real estate investor after its parent, Allianz SE, put the firm in charge of managing its Allianz Real Estate investment business. Between its own investments and those made by Allianz, Pimco acquired $12 billion in private commercial property between January 2020 and June 2021. The combined Pimco and Allianz real-estate business also originated or invested in $7 billion in real-estate loans during that time.