Real Estate and the Final Four !
The NCAA men's basketball tournament is consuming a lot of bandwith in everyone's offices. Perhaps even slowing down the speed of emailing all of those contracts, leases and loan documents around the country. Have you ever wondered if there is a connection between the real estate industry and the NCAA Tournament ?
We found this article on line in The Orange County Register which describes how the Jones Lang LaSalle (Irvine, CA office) has come up with a correlation between a college's office market vacancy rates and the likelihood of that college to succeed in the NCAA Tournament. Check it out and see if your bracket compares.
A recent case from the Sixth Circuit Bankruptcy Appellate Panel, In re Buttermilk Towne Center, LLC, 2010 Bankr. LEXIS 4563 (BAP 6th Cir. 2010), appears to have strengthened the undersecured lender’s hand in single asset real estate Chapter 11 cases. An undersecured lender is one whose collateral is worth less than the amount the debtor owes, a common scenario in today’s market. In the Buttermilk case, the Debtor defaulted on its obligation to repurchase bonds whose proceeds had funded a significant, multimillion dollar loan. The Debtor had borrowed the money to develop a commercial center in Crescent Springs, Kentucky. The Debtor leased the center from Crescent Springs, and paid its lease payments with rents generated by subleases with the center’s tenants. 
Recently, representatives from our firm were invited to meet with and participate in executive level meetings at Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose, California. We thought we were going to spend two days playing with top secret tech toys which are being developed behind darkened windows and screens. Although we did see some really innovative things, most of our time was spent interacting with Cisco executive team members discussing organizational strategies relating to how people collaborate and execute the organization's mission statement. From the moment the first session commenced we knew we were in for a transformative experience. Perhaps the best way to describe it is that we participated in a mini MBA boot camp. Over the next several posts I will share some of the information we learned.
2011 is the year when the Baby Boomers begin to turn 65 years old. This trend will continue for the next twenty years. How is the Real Estate industry going to respond to this demographic reality ? The impact on society is enormous: housing, transportation and work force issues abound. 
After 15 years of annual increases, the overall number of residential and commercial foreclosures in Ohio actually decreased by 4% in 2010 compared to 2009, according to a report by the Supreme Court of Ohio. Of course, not every county was so fortunate with 30 out of 88 counties experiencing an increase in foreclosures. Cuyahoga County, home to our Cleveland office, still leads the state in the sheer number of foreclosures although at 12,825, there were 9% fewer foreclosures than in 2009. In Franklin County, home of our Columbus office, foreclosures rose by 2%. In Hamilton County, home of our Cincinnati office, foreclosures decreased by 2%. For complete information for all 88 Ohio counties from 2001-2010, the Supreme Court’s spreadsheet is available at: 
