What I'm Reading Unfinished Business: A new ruling in a Georgia lawsuit between a landlord and tenant found that that by accepting reduced and irregular payments for an extended period, plaintiff Atlanta Life Financial group had created a quasi-new agreement. It ruled that by accepting 16 months of initially reduced...
March 8th – Gorging
What I'm Reading Gorging: Homebuilders are buying up undeveloped lots at a frantic pace in an effort to meet today's incredibly strong demand. However, that demand isn't permanent and the land grab could lead to pain for those participating. Ivy Zelman sums it up perfectly: “The biggest concern I have...
March 5th – Wild West
What I'm Reading Wild West: The non-fungible token (NFT) trend is coming to commercial real estate as platforms look to tokenize assets via blockchain technology in order to provide more flexibility to investors. This segment of the market is fascinating to me but there a ton of potential major pitfalls. ...
March 4th – Balancing Act
What I'm Reading Balancing Act: With home prices up 14.8% YOY in January and mortgage rates rising of late as well, fewer households are able to qualify for a mortgage. The beneficiary of this will likely be rental housing, both apartments and SFR. Marcus and Millichap Leverage: The Massachusetts Superior...
March 3rd – Short Term Bet
What I'm Reading Short Term Bet: As thousands of retail leases come up for renewal, their duration is increasingly shrinking, as businesses grapple with an unpredictable future and look for ways to slash costs, stay flexible and maintain leverage over their landlords, even after the health crisis abates. If the...
February 26th – Mind the Gap
One Big Thing Treasury yields are soaring of late so of course a lot of the conversation around commercial real estate in general and multi-family in particular is when cap rates will begin to reflect this. I have a bit of a contrarian take that I outlined on a Twitter...
February 24th – Slim Pickings
What I'm Reading Slim Pickins: Despite increasing mortgage rates, housing inventory is still at a record low. One thing to watch here as the vaccine rolls out: COVID exposure has been given as one reason that people are reluctant to list their homes. While that was undoubtedly true last spring,...
February 23rd – Showing My Age
One Big Thing One of my blogging topics is narrative violation. A narrative violation what happens when a piece of data runs counter to a popular story or trend. The classic example of this was the whole “millennials never want to own homes or cars” thing that was making the...
February 22nd – Deep Thoughts
February 19th – Narrative Violation
What I'm Reading Narrative Violation: For almost a year now, there has been a popular media and financial industry narrative that people are leaving San Francisco in droves and pouring into Austin and Miami. However, a new report from the postal service based on change of address (COA) requests found...