Some commercial real estate business is stirring again.
The deals seem to be starting small, but never-the-less they are happening.
“Until a couple of transactions settled, you didn’t have a floor in the market,” says Jeff Pacy, a broker with Preston Partners in Lutherville, MD.
According to Pacy and other commercial real estate insiders outside of Baltimore, they [...]

I have been analyzing real estate and construction since 1991. I can’t even say that our current real estate collapse is unprecedented, because to me it’s not – I went through the Asian Financial Crisis, and this is like that. As a matter of fact, the Hongkong real estate slump of 1994-95 was [...]

1. The careful reading and valuable insights of Harriet Baldwin, Charles Burns, Timothy Gildner, Cameron Adams, Swee Hsien Tsung and Terry Zou are gratefully acknowledged.
2. Other plans to fix the housing market focus variously on one or more parts of the problem: they aim to shore up the capital of banks, re-constitute the mortgage [...]

Pundits have referred to 2007 as The Year of the Crash and 2008 as The Year of Deleveraging. Both are appropriate and with the initiation of 2009, as the aftereffects of the crash and its subsequent deleveraging continue to dominate economic reality, we look for hints as to what the next four quarters may hold.
One [...]

Will companies that issued derivatives based on bundled student loans be the next financial dominoes that will require a government “bailout”? The country’s long dedication to education makes it a virtual certainty.
The emphasis of the role of government in education predates the establishment of the United States as a country. As early as 1642, a [...]

Why, oh why, did the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression have to hit during a presidential election year?
The ‘Fear Index’, also known as the VIX (or, officially, the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index) is a financial tool that measures market swings or volatility. The higher the VIX goes, the scarier the market [...]

On October 1, 90-year-old Addie Polk, distraught over her home’s impending foreclosure, shot herself twice in an attempted suicide.
Fortunately, Ms. Polk’s attempt was unsuccessful. Even better for her, Fannie Mae - which had taken possession of her mortgage after numerous missed payments - forgave Ms. Polk’s debt and signed the house over to her, free [...]

It has finally happened: the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together own or guarantee almost half of the $12 trillion home mortgage debt. The takeover came after inspectors poring over the books of the two companies concluded that the accounting methods used by Freddie Mac had overstated the capital cushion of [...]

There seems to be no end to the foreclosure crisis. In fact it is likely to get worse.
Option Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) allow homeowners to choose a low minimum monthly payment typically for five years. The low monthly payments often fall short of the interest due on the loan. The difference is added to the [...]

In any small business, including running a physician’s office, the most valuable piece of your business is the real estate. Most people have heard the McDonald’s story of founder Ray Kroc, who believed that the most valuable aspect of McDonald’s was the real estate underneath each restaurant. For small business owners including physicians, getting a [...]