The Real Estate Bloggers

Posted: 13 Oct 2010 07:23 AM PDT

“May You Live in Interesting Times” is an old Chinese curse. Why I love it is during boring times the interesting times looks so darn … interesting.

Howerve when you are living in them like we are now, interesting times can be exhausting, exasperating, and agonizing.

In the past few years we have seen a real estate industry that was on fire. Cheap money, government policies that enticed people to buy, and lenders who would lend to the indigent created a groundswell of activity.

Now we are in the hangover of the party. And it is brutal.

The properties that move the fastest are the ones taken over by a bank or the bank is eating part of the existing mortgage. Homeowners are left with no equity on the table and deciding just to give up. Even those homeowners who have followed every law in the book.

Banks are afraid of foreclosing on homes right now because they have no idea whether the paperwork on the loan is even legal after they have bought and sold, not to mention securitized, the loans 10 different times. All traditional common law foundations on lending and title are being tweaked as our elected officials race to pass laws in the dead of night to get the banks off the hook.

It is so bad the banks are afraid of selling the foreclosed homes they have contracts on now. The industry is grinding to a standstill.

And those who are looking to sell their homes have no idea what the price is to market their homes. There is no market in the traditional sense. They know they can underprice the home, but the slowdown in activity still does not guarantee a quick sale.

This is the real estate dynamic in a community these days:

We have agents who have homes listed for prices that the will not sell because homeowners owe too much to sell at that price.
Meanwhile banks that have contracts on homes down the street at a bargain bin price that they will not sell because they do not know whether they can legally sell the home.
And another family in the neighborhood has not paid their mortgage for a year but the bank is afraid to foreclose because they are not certain who really owns the loan they manage.
And any buyer looking to buy in the neighborhood is confused because they really can not get a good understanding of what the homes are worth in the community and don’t have a clue what their biggest asset will be worth in 5 years.

This is the definition of “Interesting Times” in the world of real estate.

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RIP, Robert Tishman, 94

Posted: 13 Oct 2010 06:51 AM PDT

One of the giants of the commercial real estate industry has passed away. Robert V. Tishman, founding chairman of Tishman Speyer Properties, passed away at his home Monday.

Mr. Tishman was founding chairman of Tishman Speyer Properties, a company he started in 1978 with his son-in-law at the time, Jerry I. Speyer. It was an outgrowth of Tishman Realty and Construction, the company created by his grandfather Julius, who in 1898 had taken the profits from a department store in Newburgh, N.Y., and built a six-story tenement on the Lower East Side.

As president and chief executive of Tishman Realty and Construction (originally Julius Tishman & Sons) in the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Tishman ran what became one of the largest owners and builders of office buildings in the country. Working with his cousin John, who was in charge of the construction division, Mr. Tishman negotiated the contracts with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and oversaw construction of the World Trade Center. via NY Times

Thanks for reading this post. If you would like to see more articles like this, please come visit The Real Estate Bloggers. where it was originally published.

RIP, Robert Tishman, 94