Fannie Mae is now offering a new commercial loan modification program aimed exclusively at commercial real estate owners who are unable to make their monthly mortgage payments. The new program called the Payment Reduction Plan (PRP) comes as welcome relief to many apartment building, office building and shopping center owners who have seen drastic [...]
Pricing land for development can be a daunting task for the untrained investor. As a niche subset of both residential and commercial real estate, using comparables for land can be as dangerous to a developer as it is mysterious, sometimes causing the failure of what was certain to be a fantastic development.
If you own a fairly large complex, it would make sense to install a vending machine. Assuming you’re an expert of your market, you could effectively target your tenants by placing products you know your tenants would want in the machine. The best place to put your vending machine is in an area that generates a solid flow of tenants; the 
As the residential real estate market has seen a massive level of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures over the past twelve months the commercial real estate market so far has not seen the same kind of fallout. However, this could soon change. In fact, 
Investing in real estate is just that—INVESTING. Risk comes with the territory. The key to successful real estate investing lies in the analysis and due diligence of a potential income property. When done prudently and methodically, the investor’s risk is not only greatly mitigated, but he or she should have clear line of sight as to the property’s return potential. Sounds relatively straightforward, right? Well, this task becomes much harder when the seller tries to make a monetary gain by feeding on the inexperienced investor’s lack of knowledge or inadequate due diligence. Luckily, we’re all savvy investors at BiggerPockets.com and we know how to spot these seller exaggerations and fallacies. Let’s examine some of the common ones.
Executive summaries are one of the most important aspects of commercial loan package submission, however, many new investors spend the least time and energy on this essential component. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lori McMahon of LJ Commercial Property Services. She creates and submits executive summaries as her profession and is considered to be an expert in the field. Below is a list of questions and answers exchanged by a new commercial real estate investor and Lori.
Joshua Dorkin
Charles Feldman
Ted Karsch.
Deja-Vu… All Over Again! This time in the Commercial Real Estate Market
by Peter Giardini | October 21, 2009I was surprised by some of the comments regarding Dr. Doom AKA Nouriel Roubini and his predictions that we are not yet out of the economic woods, and we are most likely going to experience continued turmoil in our economy in general and real estate specifically.
To the point – it seems that everyone is now paying attention to the coming challenges with the commercial mortgage market. And who can blame anyone for thinking that the commercial market is on the edge, and will likely go right over the side in the coming 2 – 3 years.
Using Old Valuations Can Lead to Disaster!
Making this situation worse is the fact that most lenders are valuing the underlying properties collateralizing their mortgages at their original values (just like what is happening with residential properties), further forestalling the pending crisis in bank defaults. If banks revalued their portfolios to the real (current) values of their underlying collateral… it is possible the entire system would collapse. I found an interesting dialogon public radio amongst various experts regarding the pending (actually it has already started) commercial collapse that demonstrates that some people may have their head in the sand.