A few recent articles about real estate

I’ve started contributing articles to IREI Weekly, a commercial real estate ‘zine. It’s been a challenge because the stories are supposed to be different from the usual stuff I do for Institutional Real Estate, Inc. — lighter, more opinionated, and shorter (getting down to 250 words can be harder than you might imagine). Here are a few recent pieces:

January 22, 2008
What Distress Looks Like
“Harry Macklowe is the new Donald Trump,” remarked a real estate investment manager at Institutional Real Estate, Inc.’s Sponsor Briefing on Jan. 9, referring to Macklowe’s much-publicized travails.
Last year, his firm, Macklowe Properties, paid $7 billion to acquire a portfolio of midtown Manhattan office buildings from The Blackstone Group — buildings Blackstone had just acquired in its $39 billion buyout of Equity Office Properties Trust. Macklowe Properties only put down $50 million in equity for the deal and financed the rest — and those loans will come due in February, just one year after his megadeal closed.
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January 15, 2008
The R Word
Here’s a brainteaser: Is the U.S. economy (a) weakening, (b) heading for a recession, or (c) already in a recession?
A spokesman for the International Monetary Fund, Masood Ahmed, said last week that we’re not in a recession, nor does the IMF predict a recession, although the risk of one has increased, reported Reuters.
Martin Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which monitors business cycles, said last week that the chance of a recession was now more than 50 percent, but that a recession is “not a sure thing,” reported Reuters.
Brad DeLong, an economics professor at U.C. Berkeley, said last week on KQED’s Forum (San Francisco Bay Area) radio program (and in his blog) that the odds we are in a recession right now are more than 60 percent and that it was likely we’ll find out the recession started last November.
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