Mark Bratton (R) and Mike Hamasu quoted in the Pacific Business News:
Every January, members of Honolulu’s commercial real estate community gather in a hotel ballroom to hear local experts predict what the market will do in the coming year.
And each year, the prognosticators come fairly close in their assessments of what will happen in the commercial, retail and industrial markets.
But in contrast to the upbeat presentations forecasting lower vacancies and higher prices over the past several years, the mood was somber when the group got together last week.
The consensus was that commercial real estate sales, which plummeted in 2008, will drop further along with land prices and rents while office and retail vacancies will rise.
http://pacific.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2009/01/26/story3.html