Plots & Ploys: Price Is Right?

Wall Street Journal (07/23/08) P. C12; Simon, Ruth; Wei, Lingling; Corkery, Michael
The major rating and research firms are sending mixed messages regarding the current state of the nation's commercial property sector. A Moody's Investors Service index shows that prices of apartment, office and retail properties dipped 5.7 percent during May from a year earlier and have logged three straight months of declines. However, Standard & Poor's latest commercial real estate indexes show that prices are up 3.1 percent from a year earlier. The disparity may be caused by different methodologies; S&P results include one-off building sales, while Moody's researchers look at repeat sales of the same building, resulting in a smaller sample size.