Articles About Financing

Nine million homeowners can breathe a preliminary sigh of relief.  They may get to keep their homes now that President Obama has unveiled his ambitious – and larger than expected — $75 billion mortgage relief plan.  At the same time, the Treasury Department will double the size of its support of Fannie Mae and Freddie […]

The surge in the construction-loan delinquency rate – both residential and commercial – suggests that lenders will remain reluctant to make loans for new construction. Developers usually finance projects through short-term construction loans.  Once the project has stabilized, the developer seeks long-term debt.  With the current economic downturn, developers are finding it difficult to obtain […]

You know what they say about polls.  Still, a recent one is an interesting temperature reading for the new economy.   Overseas investors in United States real estate prefer retail versus office or industrial space right now, according to an issue of Commercial Property News. This is just one conclusion in a survey that examined […]

On NAIOP member Jack Schultz’s list of Top 10 Development Trends for 2008, one really stands out. Following Kalamazoo, MI; Newton, IA; and El Dorado, AZ, have promised to pay for the college education of anyone who completes grade and high schools.  In light of of the economic flux that we are currently in, this seems like a […]

I recently hosted a panel at DePaul University in Chicago on the history of corporate real estate, which highlighted the sector’s emergence from an embedded functionary to a stand-alone department with direct reporting to the CFO.  Unlike today’s more integrated version, the blueprint for corporations throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s was the holding company corporate model, featuring […]

The February, 2008 issue of Healthcare Real Estate Insights reported on the Titanic of MOB transactions – the acquisition of 28 medical office buildings (MOBs) by Nationwide Health Properties, a healthcare REIT based in Newport, CA. The deal, worth $915 million, included a portfolio of existing and future MOBs totaling 2 million SF. There is […]

The current debate about spiralling fuel prices uses the price of gasoline at the pump as the belwether of energy prices. In the real estate industry, the energy metric commonly raised is electricity. But another spike is more striking: Diesel fuel prices soared 26.75 cents, or 7 percent, to an average $4.0630 per gallon from […]

With the current upheaval in the capital markets and the news that Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have written off $70 billion in loans, it is interesting to note a whole cadre of financial institutions that are doing gangbusters.  According to an article in the 2/19/08 USA Today, smaller banks which avoided the enticement […]

With all of the bad news about the housing market and the impact of sub-prime loans, its worth putting this in a historical context.  The U.S. mortgage market totals $12 trillion. Of that, $2.4 trillion is sub-prime loans.  Of this 20% of the debt will go bad — about $400 billion.  That equates to 3% […]