Median household income was $67,500 in 2020, down 2.9% from the prior year.
Rising Rents
National asking rents rose 10.3% in August, measured on an annual basis. That marked the first double-digit increase in the more than 20 years this data has been collected.
BX Soho China
Shares in Chinese commercial-property developer Soho China Ltd. tumbled 35% Monday, after Blackstone Inc. abandoned a $3.3 billion takeover in the face of an unexpectedly long regulatory review.
Crypto Lending
The business is growing rapidly. One group of crypto lenders has $25 billion in loans outstanding to individual and institutional clients, up from $1.4 billion a year ago.
Scheduled Flights
Between Aug. 3 and Aug. 26, airlines dropped approximately 77,000 domestic flights in the United States as the Covid-19 Delta variant flared.
Closed Hotels
In April 2020, 814,000 rooms — or 15% of the U.S. hotel room inventory — closed. That figure has dropped to around 2% in June 2021, just over 100,000 rooms.
Office Occupancy
Offices in 10 major U.S. cities were just 33.1% occupied in the week ending Aug. 25. That figure is a slight increase over the prior week but down from a 34.8% peak in late July.
Rents
Asking rents for houses rose nearly 13% for the year to date through July, the highest annual increase in the past five years. The sharp rise partly reflects increasing demand from people who can’t afford to buy homes, and the slow supply of new houses as construction trails historical levels relative to population growth.
SPAC Rout
A group of 137 SPACs that closed mergers by mid-February have lost 25% of their combined value. At one point last month, the pullback topped $100 billion.
BX QTS
Blackstone completed their previously announced acquisition of QTS Realty Trust, a leading provider of data center solutions across a diverse footprint spanning more than 7 million square feet of owned mega scale data center space within North America and Europe, for approximately $10 billion.