REIT's have been on a tear in the past year and apartment REIT’s have been doing particularly well. NAREIT finds that apartment REITs had a return of 47% compared to 15.06% for the S&P 500[i]. Actually I found even the S&P returns to be better than I expected as we headed into 2010. I still don’t believe in a lot of public earnings but then again, I am a real estate analyst rather than a securities analyst. The REIT returns have been even more shocking. Why is the apartment sector faring better... read more

Costar has published a fascinating discussion of distressed real estate trends and distressed debt. Ron Opfer discusses Las Vegas below in this direct quote from the Costar Article. The Craig Promenade deal is typical of what Las Vegas insiders are seeing these days. "There have been three 90,000-square-foot plus retail centers, (one was retail/office), close in the last 90 days. None of them are grocery anchored, and, most of them have been plagued with leasing trouble," said Ron Opfer, director o... read more

Cosmopolitan opened on the 15th of December and I finally made it there yesterday. The property cost $3.9 Billion and has 2,995 rooms. This is actually a significant increase in the available room supply on the strip. The word about employment that we are hearing is that the property has about 5,000 employees. That’s about 1.6 employees per room, down from the 2+ figures we used to hear about in the upper-end resorts. It is very likely that recent economic strains have caused firms to automate more tasks and ... read more

FNC,Inc has developed and published a new home price index using a hedonic, rather than repeat sale method. Basically, the hedonic approach uses price as the dependent variable and the characteristics of the homes sold as regressors (ie, home size, age, location, etc.). Essentially this is taking a partial derivative of price with respect to each variable, or characteristic of homes. By employing this method, FNC,Inc hopes to overcome some of the problems associated with repeat sales. One being a sample selectio... read more

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