The Good. The Bad. The Ugly. Nashville’s 2011 CRE Outlook

At the Dec. 9 Business Outlook Summit, co-hosted by the Nashville Chamber and ULI Nashville, the Urban Land Institute outlined its predictions for CRE in 2011.

ULI’s “2011 Emerging Trends in Real Estate” report provides a muted outlook for CRE, but some interesting takeaways for the Nashville market. The Nashville Business Journal sums up the general CRE outlook here.

I think that if the ULI used a “good/bad/ugly scale” for its report’s abstract, it would read something like this:

The good: land acquisition, long-term lending

The bad: employment

The ugly: retail, long-term debt

The fact that long-term lending is touted as a good thing, while long-term debt is described as a bad thing is a conundrum to me: Doesn’t one cause the other?

One thing that was mentioned on the positive side of the CRE balance sheet was that Nashville’s 2011 outlook ranks first among southern cities, ahead of Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. That’s great considering that Nashville only ranks 13 in population compared to other southern cities.

I’ll take a #1 outlook any day.