When was the last time that you saw new small commercial buildings going up all over town? I can't even remember such a flurry of new commercial construction.
At the same time, construction costs keep going up and up. Lumber prices went crazy between 2021 and 2023. Since then, lumber prices have not declined. It costs a ton of money to build a new small commercial building today.
The same is not true for large, trophy, commercial properties. Institutions always want to own such tangible evidence of investment, and such large projects always seem to be overbuilt.
I was in this business during the S&L Crisis, starting in 1986, when large office buildings were insanely overbuilt. It was the era of see-through buildings, office buildings so devoid of tenants that you could see right through them. I'm not sure the country ever absorbed all of the excess office space built in the late 1980's.
But small commercial properties, the ones typically occupied by just one or two businesses, have been neglected by builders for as long as I can remember.
The reason I am writing to you today because the last four or five hard money commercial loans that my company has made have been used by our borrowers to take old, existing commercial buildings and upgrade them to modern standards.
As you drive around town, do you see a lot of small commercial buildings that are vacant? I certainly don't.
So we start from a position where small commercial properties are definitely not overbuilt. Then we add the most immense government investment campaign of our lives.
President Trump is almost doubling the US defense budget. Right now it's on the order of $849 billion a year. He is increasing it to $1.5 trillion. He's going to have every industrial company in the country building for him new ships, fighters, missiles, bombs, drones and counter-drones.
This is going to surprise a lot of people, but I am becoming a bull on the US economy. We're spending money like a drunker sailor, but we sure are spending.
