Much of the news over the summer of 2008 has been negative, somewhat depressing, and duplicative. Unfortunately, our post today is much of the same, but there comes a time when there is just no way to avoid the news. The truth is that we need to know how to set our course in the days to come.
As reported […]

The omnibus housing bill, otherwise officially know as Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008, passed  in a 72-13 vote Saturday (July 26, 2008), the Senate concurred with previous House amendments to HR 3221.
In effect, the passing of this bill, grants the Bush administration’s request to give the Treasury Department the temporary authority to buy an unlimited amount of the […]

The Wall Street Journals Jonathan Karp provides a fascinating expose’, entitled HARD MONEY: Real-Estate Financier’s Death Hints At Trouble for Lenders, detailing a griping personal tale of Scott Coles and his company Mortgages, Ltd., that outlines a bizarre set of facts even greater than what fiction could believably spin.  
Unfortunately this story is true, and arguably representative […]

Here we go again. Recently, the headlines have been dominated by the global banks, like Bear Sterns, and their massive missteps and huge losses.
For instance, this just in from CitiGroup: $8.9 billion of write-downs in the second quarter, nearly $15 billion of losses in the last two quarters of 2008, and more than $46 […]

As reported by Wall Street Journal today, federal regulators warned that banking-industry turmoil would continue as financial institutions come to terms with piles of bad loans they made to finance the construction of homes and condominiums.
A New Phenomena: Until now, most of the damage to banks from the housing crisis has come from homeowners defaulting […]

So you think title is typically not an integral part of your deal. Think again!
Here is a title story, of epic proportions, told to us InmanNews. Remember this scenario the next time someone poo-poos the importance of securing title, prior to a development deal.
Some Hollywood moguls who were ready to build a $282 million movie production […]

Amongst all the clutter (and there is surely tons of clutter in the news these days), here is some truly worthwhile reading regarding: “Why a Housing Bailout Won’t Help,” from the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, Jr.
Most of us have read the anti-bailout arguments. What makes this piece so very interesting is Holman’s analysis of […]

History does seem to repeat itself more often than not. So here we go again ….
In a fascinating expose in the Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Forsyth chronicles how property mogul, Ian Bruce Eichner, is poised to take yet a second fall from grace in less than two decades.
Forsyths WSJ piece not only documents the present […]

Recently in SeekingAlpha, the noted trend tracker of the financial markets, we see a variety of troubling signs that things are starting to snowball, in a negative direction. Are they real or are they just red herrings? This post is an attempt at an academic, objective overview. What do you think? How do you read […]

At MarylandCommercialTitle we actively track commercial real estate activity and the trending that is taking place in the market.  
We focus our attention on deal volumes, as this benchmark is a key threshold for all real estate professionals, for obvious reasons.
We first raised the CMBX Index issue – the little known London-based index that tracks the values […]