Trueline's Cost Nearly Doubled; Its Bank Stepped Back

Commercial real estate loans held by the country's banks, November 2023 to October 2026. The latest reading is $3.15 trillion, for the week of Oct. 28, 2026.

Chart by the Intelligencer from figures by the Federal Reserve Board, via FRED

Banks are adding commercial property loans at about three times last year's pace. Federal Reserve figures released Friday show those loans grew at an annual rate of 5.2 per cent in September and 5.5 per cent in August, against 1.6 per cent for all of 2025 and 1.8 per cent for 2024. Banks held about $3.15 trillion of them in late October.

The 5-year Treasury yield closed Monday at 4.67 per cent and the 10-year at 4.88 per cent, the Treasury Department reported. Both are more than a third of a point lower than in early October.

GREENVILLE, S.C., Nov. 9. The Greenville Housing Authority has bought out the private investors in four Nicholtown apartment communities, 432 homes in all, for $8,467,553, the authority said. It already managed all four, and it said the purchase keeps them affordable.

The four are Evergreen Place on Roosevelt Avenue and the three that make up Heritage: Forest View, Nichol Town Green and Clark Ridge. They were built or rebuilt from 2006 to 2008 where Fieldcrest Village once stood, with a federal HOPE VI grant and with money from investors who received low-income housing tax credits in return. Those credits kept rents affordable for a set period, which has now ended. After it, an owner can typically raise rents to market rates, the authority said.

United Community Bank financed the purchase of Nichol Town Green and Clark Ridge. The authority paid for the other two from its own reserves.

GREENVILLE, S.C., Nov. 6. Smoke on the Water, the barbecue tavern that left its West End home at 1 Augusta Street in March 2024 when its long lease there ended, reopened Friday at 64 Beacon Drive, off Pelham Road near Interstate 85, Fox Carolina reported. The new place has a bigger kitchen, room for private parties and catering, and tables outdoors.

Mike Shuler, who started the restaurant with Frances "Chicken" Lea and her husband, Hurdle Lea, still owns it. The move took two and a half years, because permits and paperwork held up construction, he has said.

NEW YORK, Nov. 9. Oil fell more than 4 per cent Monday after President Trump said new attacks on Iran were highly unlikely while talks continue, CNBC reported.

The biggest American real estate booms of the last century started when borrowing suddenly got easier or when the tax law suddenly made buildings more profitable to own. Each one ended when that advantage went away.

The homebuilding boom after the Second World War started with a loan guarantee. The GI Bill, which President Roosevelt signed in June 1944, let the Veterans Administration guarantee veterans' home loans, and from 1944 to 1952 it backed nearly 2.4 million of them. In 1940, 44 per cent of American households owned their homes, the Census Bureau says. Within about two decades after the war, more than 60 per cent did.

The office boom of the 1980s started with the tax code. A 1981 law let investors write off a commercial building over 15 years instead of 40, which the FDIC calls a major reason for the building rush that followed. Deregulation had also made property loans profitable for banks, and they lent heavily. In the country's 31 largest office markets, new office space went from an average of about 34 million square feet a year in 1975 through 1979 to about 98 million a year in 1980 through 1984.

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 took most of that back. It ended the faster write-offs and stopped most investors from using losses on rental property to cut the taxes on their other income. Office vacancy in Austin reached nearly 40 per cent in 1987, and when banks cut back sharply in the early 1990s, commercial property prices fell across the country, the FDIC found.

The housing boom of the early 2000s was a credit boom. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found that low interest rates and easy money created the conditions for a credit bubble, and it counted the failure to rein in excesses in mortgage lending and finance among the principal causes of the crash that followed.

Each boom was started by something outside the buildings: a federal guarantee, a tax write-off, a flood of mortgage money. Because commercial property is mostly bought with borrowed money, its prices move with interest rates and credit, the FDIC notes. The people hurt most were those who bought, built or lent late, counting on the advantage to last. A big project takes years to finish, so one started at the top of a boom can open in the bust.

"Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field; and afterwards build thine house." Proverbs 24:27.

The proverb's order is plain: the field first, then the house. In a farming country the field was the living, and the house was what the living could afford. A man who built first and planted later might sit in a fine house with nothing to put on the table.

I have watched that order get turned around more than once, and not only by young men. It is easy to want the house you can picture before the field that pays for it is ready. The proverb does not scorn the house. It says "afterwards," and it means it.

So today, before I set my heart on anything new, I mean to look at the field: the work that pays, the people who depend on it, the ground still to be cleared. A house built in that order has something under it.

Dear Editor: I asked three roofers for an estimate on the duplex I rent out. The first sent a figure by text message with no name attached. The second promised to come Thursday and has not said which Thursday. The third came, climbed up, came down, and asked for half the money before he would order a shingle. I paid for my first roof with a check and a handshake. Is a handshake still accepted in this county? [It is, Sir, though a signed contract keeps it honest. ED.]

A Small Landlord, Laurens Road

The Weather Service expects increasing clouds over Greenville today, a high near 72 and a light west-southwest wind in the afternoon. Tonight, partly cloudy, with a low around 48.