There are certain difficulties that can come up when it comes to selling commercial properties.
One is that it can sometimes be difficult to get the price one was hoping for. Depending on market conditions, a seller might end up having to take much less than their asking price. Thus, prospective sellers will likely find it encouraging that recent statistics indicate that, in recent times, the final selling prices of U.S. commercial properties have generally been moving closer to asking prices.
The statistics are from a report from CoStar. In January 2014, commercial real estate in the U.S., on average, was selling at about 88.8 percent of asking price. This January, that percentage was all the way up to 91.2 percent. For a majority of the time since January 2012, the U.S. commercial real estate market has been experiencing an increase in the average sale-price-to-asking-price ratio.
Another difficulty when it comes to selling real estate is that it can sometimes take quite a while to make a sale. On this front as well though, the above-mentioned report contains some good news for sellers. For most of the time since July 2012, the prevailing trend when it comes to market time for U.S. commercial property has been decreasing market time. This January, the average number of days a commercial property was on the market was down to 390 days.
Yet another challenge that can be present when it comes to selling real estate is that commercial property transactions can have many legal complexities. There are many different issues it can be very important to address in sales negotiations and many different legal disputes that could potentially arise during such negotiations. Failing to deal properly with legal matters in a real estate sale could cause a seller to face more costs than they would have had to, cause a real estate deal to take longer than it needed to go through or could even cause the sale to fall through altogether.
Thus, parties that are trying to sell a commercial property may want to obtain the representation of a commercial real estate attorney to assist them with legal matters that arise in relation to prospective sales.
Source: REjournals.com, "CoStar: It’s taking owners fewer days to sell their commercial real estate today," Dan Rafter, March 13, 2015