Continue Reading Add comment February 3rd, 2009
I just saw this Associated Press article about Wells Fargo–beneficiary of $25 billion in federal bailout funds–throwing a corporate junket in Las Vegas for its mortgage brokers.
I’m posting this at five mintues until 1 P.M. Pacific time. I want to see how many minutes it takes for the company to cancel the event.
Tick, tick, tick..
Continue Reading Add comment February 3rd, 2009
New data out today out today from the U.S. Census bureau suggests one out of every seven homes in the U.S. is vacant. Before you go thinking that a population the size of Beijing is suddenly homeless in America take another look at the numbers.
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The Census data says nearly 19 million “housing units” are vacant. That number includes apartments, where the biggest increase in vacancy has occurred in the past year. Some 10.1% of all apartments were vacant in the fourth quarter of 2008, versus 9.6% at the end of 2007.
The big 19 million number also includes some 4.8 million second homes and vacation properties that would probably be vacant this time of year anyway. More problematic is another 7.8 million listed in the “other” category which represents foreclosures and other uninhabited dwellings.
In terms of owner-occupied homes the vacancy rate has crept up from 2.8% in 2007 to 2.9% in 2008. That is high, a percentage not seen since 1956 apparently. The average over the past decade was 1.8%. Still, it’s not a dramatic increase in the past year, nor is it the big one-in-seven homes the 19 million homes headlines suggests.
Continue Reading Add comment February 3rd, 2009
Recommended reading for today: Felix Salmon’s blog post on Ed Glaeser’s review in The New Republic of Robert Ellickson’s book, The Household: Informal Order around the Hearth. Lots of good thinking about what causes foreclosures and how to deal with them humanely and effectively.
Continue Reading Add comment February 3rd, 2009
Proving that, even in today’s stalled markets, large-scale deals are getting done, CB Richard Ellis Investors has acquired the 420,000-square-foot Metropolitan Center in East Rutherford, N.J., from ING Clarion. The deal represented the third time in five years that the Class A office property has changed hands and is more evidence that high-profile assets located in prominent markets are still attracting buyers.
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