Here's how hard COVID has hit real estate: And yet, despite the carnage, there's one surprising bright spot.

One key data point says a lot about the current state of the Chicago commercial real estate market, and it's not good. The delinquency rate on mortgages packaged and resold as bonds - known as commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS - rose to a record 14 percent in June, eclipsing the last high of 10.4 percent in 2013, according to Trepp, a New York research firm. By mid-May, the average net rent at a downtown apartment building had already fallen more than 7 percent from a year earlier, according to the Chicago office Integra Realty Resources, a consulting and appraisal firm. [Extracted from the article]