On June 15, Downdetector® received numerous reports that T-Mobile was down in the United States. The peak of the outage reports on that day came in around 12:00 pm, PST. There were 113,980 reports during that peak. Soon after, users began reporting issues with AT&T and Verizon (and other smaller operators) as well, though in much smaller numbers (3,861 and 8,619 reports, respectively, at around 1:30 pm, PST).
As one of the first states to reopen, many eyes are on Georgia to understand the impact. After nearly 2 months into the reopen, many state officials are quick to point out that there hasn’t been a rebound in new COVID cases. To give context for this lack of infection rebound we take a look at credit card receipt data from Yodlee to understand how open the state actually is.
As of June 1st, nationwide spending growth improved over 20 points from trough. While the stay-at-home orders for all but five states expired*(DC, NJ, OR, PA, VA), retail activity is still reopening at varied phases in different regions across the country. As a result, spending improvements have continued to stagger and look different across states.
Incredibly, we’ve hit the three month milestone of post-COVID life. In that time, we’ve had three distinct phases of foot traffic activity: Panic and Prepare: Beginning on 3/11, the nation quickly prepared for sheltering-in-place and returned to their homes. Over ten days, foot traffic went wild before landing at all-time-lows for most categories.
This is the 13th edition of a weekly review of changes in road traffic demand in the United States from the COVID-19 virus spread and our collective response. We will endeavor to publish this Synopsis every Monday for the foreseeable future, providing results through Friday of the previous week.
The Covid-19 crisis is scuppering commercial real estate transactions worldwide with the pandemic making it harder to complete deals and upending financial and economic projections. The number of terminated contract deals as a percentage of closed transactions has jumped across the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific as the tally of completed transactions in those geographies has also sunk.
Rent increases slowed across all price levels, though rents for lower-priced homes increased faster than those of higher-priced homes in April compared with a year earlier. Phoenix had the highest increase in rent in April from a year earlier, showing only a small slowdown in growth.
New and existing housing activity declined across the board in May. However, a trend is beginning to appear within the housing market, where other housing indicators—existing home sales, construction jobs, mortgage locks, homebuilder sentiment, and more—started seeing improvement this month. Maintenance and remodeling—a subset of maintenance that includes renovations, additions, and alterations—declined year over year again in May, but not to the extent that it did in April.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have launched over 100 cloud computing products since 2017, including nearly 50 in the Machine Learning category alone. Yet, the data suggests that customers typically do not feel compelled to adopt these new products, particularly in the Machine Learning (ML) category.
The biggest impact of uncertainty and upheaval of the last few months has been the drastic reduction in multifamily demand. Depending on the area or the product type, either average occupancy or average effective rent may have been adversely affected more than the other – but net absorption decline has been the rule everywhere.
With U.S. cities and states under shelter-in-place orders to limit the spread of the coronavirus, Americans’ reduced mobility has resulted in plummeting sales at rideshare companies. In May, Uber and Lyft sales both fell 86 percent, respectively, year-over-year. Weekly data reveals that, after a steep drop at the end of the last quarter, sales are no longer declining at either company.
As the COVID-19 pandemic began picking up steam everywhere in March, many businesses around the nation ordered their workforces to work from home, causing a dramatic shift in how large numbers of us work. Many companies announced remote work plans that encompassed the entire year of 2020, and some, including Twitter and Square, even declared permanent work from home policies.
Properties net leased to casual-dining restaurants, which before the first quarter had been seeing a softening of investor demand as a result of changes in consumer preferences, got hit hard during this year's first three months. Capitalization rates, or the yields investors require from their property purchases, were 6.59 percent in the first quarter, up 27 basis points from a year ago, according to Boulder Group, a boutique brokerage in Chicago that specializes in net-leased properties.
All 50 states have reopened and consumers are starting to come out of the woods. Morgan Stanley economists are predicting a V-shaped recovery for the economy, but we aren’t there yet. We are still navigating uncertainty. Despite many unknowns, we do have ad data across industries. When we look at the ad dollars—even in industries that have been hit hard—we see that some sectors are having a come back.
At Home is in the midst of a significant expansion, and the results are looking incredibly strong. In-store activity kicked off strong in 2020 with visits in January and February that were up 7.7% and 13.5% year over year. The pandemic then drove a major drop in March with visits plummeting to a 56.4% year-over-year decline and bottoming out in April.
It’s over. The UK’s aviation dream was broken this morning when U2 883 departed from London Gatwick for Glasgow at 07:00; the first of some eleven scheduled flights from the airport today. The same day last year 435 scheduled services departed from the airport; we still have a long way to go in that recovery.
Total construction starts rose 3% from April to May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $595.1 billion, following a 25% decline the previous month. Several large nonresidential building projects broke ground in May resulting in the gain. Removing those large projects from the statistics would have resulted in no change in starts over the month. In May, nonresidential buildings increased 8%, while residential building starts rose 4%. Nonbuilding starts, however, declined 4% during the month.
This year has not been kind to the beleaguered US retail sector. Several major chains, including Neiman Marcus, JC Penney, and J Crew have declared bankruptcy, joining a host of smaller retailers that have succumbed to the pandemic-driven pause in brick-and-mortar retail shopping. More are expected, and a similar scenario is playing out in the UK retail sector.
Earlier this year, the dawn of COVID-19 triggered mass stockpiling of toilet paper, causing widespread shortages. Second Measure’s data shows that one company in particular has benefited from this: Tushy, which sells bidets and bamboo toilet paper. Both Tushy’s sales and customer counts increased six-fold the week of March 9th, when the frenzy really began.
Building on previous posts from Advan Research and Eigen10 Advisors using anonymized cell phone movement over time to analyze the impact of Covid-19 on various real estate property segments, this week we explore the different experiences metro areas have had returning to the office. The market areas were chosen to represent a cross-section of the country, which had their own set of stay in place orders, and in turn, timing of a return to work. The markets analyzed are a section of Plano TX, part of Nashville CBD, a section of Phoenix near Scottsdale and the Seaport District in Boston MA.
