A Little Much With the Drama, DBJ

Friday’s print edition of the Dallas Business Journal sure looked scary — “Forcasting gloom, doom” — complete with a hooded figure of death with glowing red eyes. Or maybe it was a Jawa. Anyway, I got around to the piece today, and wow. What a load. Now, I’m not saying that a bump in the sublease market isn’t notable, and I’m not saying Craig Hall isn’t right to be concerned about the wider effects of the subprime morgage collapse. But come on. This is ridiculous. It’s not Pollyana when I say the market fundamentals are solid. Job growth is steady in our market and unemployment is at historic lows. Those are the drivers of commercial real estate. “Doom and gloom?” Are you kidding me? Do you people remember the late 1980s, or the collapse in the late 1990s? And then the jump headline “Once-aggressive developer sees a permanently changed RE landscape.” I have serious doubts anyone as smart as Hall would declare any changes the real estate market goes through as permanent. Someone’s definitely overplaying his hand. This is the kind of overwrought, underreported business story I expect to see in Fortune magazine, not my local business journal.