Categories: Investing in Real Estate

Immigrants Still See Real Estate As A Path To Wealth

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 05

Waiting for a bus on my way to work I picked up a copy of the real estate sections of The Korea Times, a local newspaper serving the Korean...

Lessons From Being A Landlord

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on October 26

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I bought a bank-owned home as an investment property last March. Here’s an update. I lost my first tenant in September....

He Wrote The Book On Real Estate Investing

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on August 15

Long before “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” “Art of the Deal” and the gazillion other books on how to get rich in real estate were published, William Nickerson was the...

Investing in Home Loans Online

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on July 01

Investors purchase stocks online. Will they buy somebody’s mortgage over the Web as well? A start-up called BigBidder.com hopes so. The backers of BigBidder already run lfc.com, a commercial...

Mortgage securities: They aren't all lemons

Posted by: Peter Coy on May 29

Investors in mortgage securities swung from irrational exuberance to equally irrational pessism. Not long ago, they seemed to have concluded that just about every house in America was going...

Tell Us Your Real Estate Story

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on May 22

Agent Debbie Blumenthal tells us how she tapped into a retirement account to pay for an investment property she's now renting out for $1,150 a month. "I'm a realtor...

Tata's Nano Home: Company behind world's cheapest car to sell $7,800 apartments

Posted by: Prashant Gopal on May 07

Tata, the Indian company that made worldwide headlines with its $2,000 Nano car, now plans to build 1,000 tiny apartments outside Mumbai that will sell for $7,800 to $13,400 each....

Number crunching with Krunching.com

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on May 07

I’ve said from time to time I’d like to profile some real estate related Web sites. Here’s one I found recently Krunching.com. The site was founded by Time VanDermyden, a...

What's it Like to Own a Vegas Hotel Room?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on April 13

The idea of the condo-hotel was a big fad during the housing boom. It was great for real estate developers like Donald Trump because they could get small investors—who...

Tax Tips for Rental Property

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on February 20

Uggh. Taxes. For those of you doing your taxes this weekend or at least putting the paperwork together here's some tips from the vacation rental Web site www.HomeAway.com. It's...

CalPERS Real Estate Investments Take A Beating

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 13

The $189 billion California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest and most closely watched pension fund in the country, has revealed a huge hit to its real estate portfolio. Its...

Is it Time to Buy REITs?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on October 14

After soaring through much of the decade, real estate investment trusts had a disastrous year in 2007 when their downturn presaged the overall credit market collapse. Through Oct. 10...

Good News Amidst the Carnage

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on September 17

People say us reporters never write any good news. Well, there may just be some silver lining amidst all these dark clouds on Wall Street. Gibran Nicholas, who heads...

Do College Towns Make Good Investments?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on August 08

If your kid is heading off to college this fall, does it make sense to buy him a place to live? In many cities the answer is yes, according...

Latest prediction: California's housing market will hit bottom first

Posted by: Prashant Gopal on August 01

It’s easy to call a bottom to the housing slump. The tough part is getting the timing right. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has made many such predictions. "All the signs...

The Rapist Next Door

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on July 25

Last week I posted an item about my decision to withdraw an offer I made on a duplex in Los Angeles. Thanks to everyone who commented. There was another...

My Adventures in Real Estate

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on July 18

So I’ve decided to take a stab at real estate investing. I found a duplex for sale in Los Angeles. The property is a short sale. The owner bought...

Where did all the get-rich real estate books go?

Posted by: Prashant Gopal on April 11

The mountain of get-rich real estate books on my desk reached an unwieldy pinnacle back at end of 2005 -- so much so that I had to dodge the...

Twilight of the vacation-home buyers

Posted by: Peter Coy on April 01

The National Association of Realtors announced last week that vacation-home sales dropped 31% in 2007 from 2006. Sales of homes for investment fell 18%. That compared to a drop...

Getting an F in Flipping

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on December 24

I got a call recently from a woman with a wild tale about a real estate investment she'd made as part of her studies at business school. Jill Bigelow said...

Help a homeowner, get a double-digit return

Posted by: Peter Coy on November 13

Lewis Braham wrote a fascinating article in the latest issue of BW (Nov. 19 cover date) called "Help a homeowner, get a double-digit return." It's a Personal Business story about...

Land Grab

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on November 05

What do you do when the company you work for eliminates your division? If you're Jeff Gault you go out and start a new business. Gault used to run the...

What Happens to the Renters?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on October 15

In researching our recent cover story on builder price cuts I met Sara Evans, a bartender at the ESPN Zone on the Las Vegas Strip who was packing up a...

Introducing the latest risky derivative: the C-3PO

Posted by: Peter Coy on October 03

I'm looking for an investment bank to help me issue a security of my own devising, the C-3PO. This acronym stands for ... hmmm, let me see ... Constantly Collapsing Collateral, Payment Optional. Like its droid namesake from Star Wars, my C-3PO will be quite entertaining, although a bit fussy and unreliable. In other words, it will be a lot like other asset-backed innovations concocted during the past decade of financial wizardry.

Really Empty Nests

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on May 02

Consultant Bill Conerly tips us off on his Businomics blog http://businomics.typepad.com/businomics_blog/ to the growing number of homes sitting empty. Vacancy rates for homes have bumped around 1.5% for two decades....

Tax Tips for Landlords

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on April 12

With the April 17 tax day deadline almost upon us, you should be done or almost done with your return. But just in case, here's a last minute list of...

How to Profit from Foreclosures

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on April 05

With headlines of higher default rates for subprime mortgages a daily occurance is there a way to profit from other people's woes? Yeah, there is. The folks at Yahoo.com have...

Is This Really a Good Time to Be A Flipper?

Posted by: Peter Coy on February 20

You don't tug on Superman's cape. You don't spit into the wind. And you don't try to flip houses when the market is going through its worst slump in a...

Trump Jumps to the Caribbean

Posted by: Peter Coy on February 16

Donald Trump is lending his golden name to a resort and residential development at the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic. He invited some reporters to his Trump Tower...

Which Bounces Back Faster? Phoenix or San Francisco?

Posted by: Peter Coy on October 27

I wrote an article for the current issue of BusinessWeek called Boom! Bust! Boom? Here's a link. My main finding is that around 40% of the major markets where there...

Deeper Downturn

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on June 23

It’s bad news when dismal reports on the residential real estate market are revised downward. Well, that’s just what Ed McKelvey of Goldman Sachs recently did when he re-examined his...

The Rent-To-Own Missing Link

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on June 21

I just got off the phone with Michael Shin, founder of National Home Buyers Assistance. He's started a unique business that offers a way for people with really bad credit...

Raw Land for Retirement

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on April 25

A few months ago I blogged about whether my husband and I should buy a vacation home. The idea was that we will use it in the next ten years...

Second Home Blues

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on April 11

It is no surprise that vacation and investment homes sales both set records in 2005, according to the recently-released the National Association of Realtors’ annual report. Four out of 10...

The Other Real Estate Market...

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on April 06

There is a lot more to real estate than residential homes. Glenn Mueller, the investment strategist at Dividend Capital Group, a real estate investment company, recently completed his market cycle...

Investment Plays For A Softer Market

Posted by: Peter Coy on March 30

GUEST BLOG FROM TIM MULLANEY BusinessWeek's Tim Mullaney writes: How do you invest in the softening real estate market? I don’t know what stocks I’d buy. I wouldn’t be racing...

Should you buy stock in homebuilders?

Posted by: Dean Foust on March 15

Jan Hatzius at Goldman Sachs is one of my favorite economists on Wall Street (as you can tell from earlier postings). In a new report, Hatzius tries to gander a...

No Commercial Real Estate Bubble

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on February 21

Much has been written about the residential real estate bubble –in fact, entire blogs are dedicated to the topic (thehousingbubble2 and economicrot). Commercial real estate is a much less popular...

Planning Ahead, But How Far?

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on February 07

I’ve got cold feet. Maybe this blog can warm them. My husband and I are 44 and 45, respectively, and we’re starting to think about where we want to spend...

Sold!

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on January 30

Right after I blogged about whether my family should sell our Aspen condo (Jan. 17th entry), I sat next to a fellow on an airplane and we ended up talking...

Who buys those ugly houses?

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on January 25

You've probably seen the billboards. Big black and yellow signs proclaiming "We Buy Ugly Houses." Just who are these people with bad taste and money to burn? Turns out the...

My house, my home

Posted by: Toddi Gutner on December 06

My 8-year-old son asked me recently what the words, real estate, meant. Simple, I said. Real estate is property, land, and buildings. Like our house. His father and I own...

Land Sales Could Slow

Posted by: Peter Coy on October 31

Owners of undeveloped land still have dollar signs in their eyes. But with the housing market cooling, builders aren't so willing to pay up for buildable lots. That means there...

Real Estate Investment Ideas?

Posted by: Peter Coy on October 28

Every December, BusinessWeek publishes an investment guide for the year ahead. This year I'm doing the real estate story. Here's the question my editors want me to answer: Are there...

Ranking the homebuilders

Posted by: Dean Foust on September 15

Manufacturer reputation counts a lot in other categories--say, cars, where consumers will buy a sturdy Volvo or Mercedes knowing the danged thing will last for 15 years. Up to now,...

Real estate investment clubs

Posted by: Dean Foust on August 04

Came across this interesting article over on MSN's Money site on a topic I'd been meaning to discuss: the boom in real estate investment clubs -- which have roughly quadrupled...

A way to hedge against falling home prices

Posted by: Dean Foust on August 01

My colleague Peter Coy offered a novel way to hedge against a collapse in housing prices (see below). There’s another way: There’s an online futures exchange, HedgeStreet.com, that allows you...

Down on upgrades

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on July 15

People like to joke that the bank owns their home. The reality is it's likely a mutual fund or institutional investor in the booming secondary mortgage market. Issues of mortgage-backed...

Sell your house on Wall Street

Posted by: Chris Palmeri on July 08

It's not just on Main Street where real estate is hot. Fund tracker Morningstar reports that the best returns of the 2nd quarter came from funds specializing in real estate,...

Real estate in IRAs

Posted by: Dean Foust on July 01

A fascinating story in the New York Times earlier this week noted that some investors--burned after the stock market bubble burst earlier this decade--put part of their IRA or retirement...