Weekly Market Insights
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Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner Ingredients for 10 November 23, 2009
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| Holiday shoppers keeping an eye on their food budgets will be pleased to know that the cost of the ingredients for a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 declined by 3.8 percent this year to $42.91 according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Black Friday shoppers will find even bigger markdowns in the world of commercial real estate. Renting a square foot of office space for a year will cost $26.57, a discount of 3.9 percent from the third quarter of last year, while landlords have marked down a square foot of industrial space by 6.8 percent to $5.35. Those are the asking rents, equivalent to the sticker price on a new car. Shoppers willing to haggle should be able to secure bigger markdowns. So far this year, effective rents for office and industrial space, which include periods of free rent and above-standard tenant improvement allowances, have fallen by 12.2 and 6.8 percent, respectively, from the same period in 2008. Want to build your own building? The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that non-residential construction costs have declined by 5.9 percent from a year ago, with steep discounts for land also available. The most impressive bargains are in the big-ticket category of building acquisitions where sales prices have declined by 37 percent from a year ago as reported by the Moody’s / Real Commercial Property Price Index. These statistics are averages. There are considerable variations by product type and by geography. Source: American Farm Bureau Federation |
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Bob Bach is our Senior Vice President, Chief Economist