Over the weekend my phone rang a little more than usual and I eventually figured out it was because I had been quoted in the LA Times in an article about the solar land market.  I almost didn’t even remember talking to the reporter, it happened so long ago.  I think I talked to her [...]

And it now appears we can look for the bottom in prices. My guess is that nominal house prices, using the national repeat sales indexes and not seasonally adjusted, will bottom in March 2012.

The problem with using the house price indexes to look for a bottom is that they are reported with a significant lag. [...]

In our local market we’re running up against the very real problem of declining (to gone) REO inventory for residential development sites.  The interesting thing is that the housing market has been flat to down for the past three years that it’s taken for that inventory to burn off.  This has created a dynamic where [...]

It’s been a while since I wrote a post, or really did anything in any of the CRE online communities.  This was not because I decided to never write again, or interact on Twitter.  I have two very good reasons for going off the map.  Ok, I have one very good reason, and another that [...]

It’s pretty easy to walk around and believe that everything you achieve is due to skill.  That mindset feeds our egos, so it naturally manifests easily.  However, luck and good timing have a lot to do with what we accomplish as well.

We’re closing a deal today on a commercial development site that had been widely [...]

It’s a popular thing to ridicule the “this time is different” mindset that usually manifests at market peaks, but the same mentality also becomes prevalent in market troughs as well.  Think back to conversations you’ve had in the past two years and any time you might have suggested that the market would eventually recover to [...]

Over the Fourth of July weekend I had dinner in Coronado, across the street from the Hotel Del Coronado.  If you’re in Coronado, you almost have to walk through the Hotel Del, so we did.  The Hotel Del was built in the late 1800’s and was sort of an “if you build it, they will [...]

Last week we had a discussion about the need for technical indicators in commercial real estate.  The discussion was started by REFM in this post.  I probably should have been more exact when I discussed what I would like to see.  I’m not necessarily that interested in an index per se, as I am interested [...]