It Smells Like Distress
People always underestimate how bad things can get. While we all know that trees don't grow to the sky, during a boom market the human spirit cannot believe...
How to Close the Insurance Gap On Architectural Design Defects
Most architects maintain $1 million or less in professional liability insurance, and the large firms typically carry no more than $5 million. Simple human...
Making A Business Case for Green Building
In Georgia, we call a politician with a particularly sugary tongue someone who can talk the birds from the trees. No doubt, little green birds were dropping...
Credit Bears Romp
It sure is tough to be a bull these days. One ominous signal: On Oct. 19, exactly 20 years after the Black Monday stock market crash, the Dow Jones Industrial...
Legal Strategies to Protect Your Properties
Commercial real estate owners are frequent targets of lawsuits. Typically, these are lawsuits arising from their real estate operations, such as lender...
Lessons still resonate from Hurricane Katrina
As Gulf Coast residents uneasily watch for Atlantic storms this hurricane season, housing officials and private developers in Houston keep their own vigil,...
As Good As It Gets?
If the real estate mortgage market were a chair, it would be supported by four legs: commercial real estate, single family, condo conversion, and land loans. Given the current state of the overall mortgage markets, that chair is barely standing. Three of its four legs have either fallen off or are wobbling, and only one leg remains stable — commercial real estate mortgage loans....
Global Investors Parlay Knowledge into Deals
For the 18th year in a row, veterans and virgins alike converged on Cannes March 13-16 for MIPIM The World's Property Market the largest international commercial real estate conference in the world. MIPIM is deafening, crowded and highly productive for deal makers....
Is the Public REIT Market Losing Its Luster?
Change appears to be threatening the public real estate investment trust (REIT) market. Just five years ago, the total value of public REIT mergers and acquisitions was only $10 billion with less than $2 billion coming from private equity firms....
Construction Prices Headed Up in 2007
Commercial construction costs will increase on average by 6% to 8% in 2007 two to four times faster than inflation despite a slowing economy, according to Kenneth Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC)...
