IT TOOK JUST 90 MINUTES FOR THE DAILY NEWS TO STEAL THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING.
In one of the biggest heists (pranks) in American history, the Daily News “stole” the $2 billion Empire State Building. Find out how.
The story is both hilarious and scary. Even more reason to value good and marketable title and […]

Real estate investors and professionals say financial and real estate markets in the U.S.will hit bottom in 2009 and continue to slump for much of 2010, according to a report released October 22, 2008, by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (read the full report), and as reported in the Baltimore Business Journal.
We have seen […]

The next shoe? If and when something is going to drop, you should know about it, beforehand, so that you can be proactive and strategic in your investment and management positions.
After years of plunging residential property valuations, commercial real estate (CRE) is now heading into the danger zone as  –office vacancies rise, stores close and hotel bookings fall.
All of […]

Gerald Baker of the TimesOnline puts a very interesting spin on the recent financial events, which have dominoed. In Bakers article, Crisis may prove cathartic in the long run, but the worst is not over, he states that: 
Yesterday a couple of the world’s most famous financial institutions sank without a  trace, one of the world’s […]

SeekingAlpha just posted a very intriguing opinion piece by John Preston entitled, The Reality of Real Estate and the Economy.

Is this the problem? the solution?

According to many, the thesis (and problem) is simple: Housing health and the economy are linked arm-in-arm.  

Preston traces  this theory back to Robert Shiller, of Case-Shiller Home Price Index fame, who reflects back on a 2004 […]

So is this a trend? As reported in Commercial Property News (CPN) by Scott Baltic, although not necessarily a trend just yet, it is likely more than coincidence that the Kolter Group of West Palm Beach, Fla., is the second largely commercial real estate company in the past couple of weeks to announce a big […]

Here’s the potential $2.8 trillion dollar question. In a revealing article in the New York Times, they investigate the question of how bad could things get? Since World War II, there have been 18 banking crises in industrial countries. The worst five were caused by changing lending standards or real estate bubbles (often both) and […]

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 Inman News, the current housing slump is far from over and is shaping up to be the worst in 50 years, according to an annual report on the state of the nation’s housing markets from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Drastic production cuts and deep price discounts in 2005-2007 helped […]