Is Genting looking to flip former Miami Herald property?

BY DAVID SMILEY

dsmiley@miamiherald.com

Unable to build the luxury Miami casino and resort envisioned five years ago when they dropped $236 million for 14 acres on Biscayne Bay, gaming giant Genting Group may indeed be actively seeking to flip the property.

Rumored for years, the company’s interest in selling the former site of the Miami Herald’s headquarters was confirmed recently on condition of anonymity by a developer who said he was shown the property. The meeting came after another failed attempt to change Florida’s restrictive gambling laws during the state’s 2016 legislative session.

MULTIMEDIA: The last days of the former Miami Herald building

Details such as the asking price and the exact timing of the visit were unavailable. A Genting spokeswoman denied any meeting took place.

WE HAVE NOT SHOWN THE PROPERTY TO A POTENTIAL BUYER

Melissa Rieder, Genting subsidiary Resorts World Bimini

“We have not shown the property to a potential buyer,” Melissa Rieder, marketing manager for Genting subsidiary Resorts World Bimini, wrote in a one-sentence email.

Despite the denial, the reported encounter suggests that Genting, among Miami’s more secretive real estate players, is at the very least considering a sale of the centerpiece of the company’s nearly $500 million portfolio. In total, the developer owns about 30 acres, including the Omni Mall and several parcels next to the Miami-Dade School Board headquarters.

“It means that they understand the people in downtown don’t want a big casino,” speculated Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado, who once presented Genting Chairman K.T. Lim with a key to the city only to turn on casino plans. “That’s the bottom line.”

In actuality, it’s difficult to reach any conclusions on Genting’s plans, given the company’s secrecy and years of mixed messages. After signaling years ago that it intended to build a luxury complex without a casino, company representatives reached out to Miami condo king Jorge Perez in 2014 to talk about a partnership that never developed. Similarly, a brief talk with soccer star David Beckham about a professional sports stadium at the site went nowhere.

Even now, Genting continues to be active in Tallahassee, where its Resorts World Miami affiliate is represented on matters of “casino hotels” by Ballard Partners, and in the city of Miami, where former congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart registered to lobby for the company in January. Meanwhile, Genting was among the interested parties last year when the county sought to partner with a developer to build out the space over the Omni bus station and attached Metromover station, and the company is in the midst of renovating the historic Boulevard Shops across from the Performing Arts Center.

As for building plans, Genting hasn’t submitted any for the site since seeking comments on plans for an “as-of-right” project more than two years ago, according to the city’s planning department. Since then, Assistant Director Luciana Gonzalez said a search of the department’s files show no applications for building permits, marina or bay walk.

It is, of course, possible that Genting isn’t actively shopping the site, but rather open to offers in case they get a deal too good to turn down. When the company purchased the Herald property during the recession, the price gave some sticker shock, said Suzanne Hollander, a real estate broker and FIU professor. But now, with Miami’s cooling real estate market still among the hottest in the country, Genting could still receive an offer that proves irresistible.

“In real estate, every property has a sale price even if it’s not for sale. Maybe it’s not actively on the market,” she said. “It’d make a whole lot of sense that they could make a profit on it.”

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article73865292.html

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Once-fugitive real estate heir Robert Durst eyes Los Angeles-area prison

NEW ORLEANS –  Robert Durst is asking a federal judge to recommend a Los Angeles-area prison when he's sentenced on the weapons charge that's kept him in Louisiana pending his trial on a California murder charge.

Sentencing is scheduled Wednesday for the 72-year-old real estate heir, arrested last year in New Orleans.

A Monday court filing by Durst's lawyers say Durst is ill, and that California's Terminal Island prison has the sort of medical facilities he needs. And, they note, it's near Los Angeles, where Durst faces trial in the 2000 death of his friend Susan Berman.


Durst pleaded guilty to the weapons charge in February, accepting an 85-month prison sentence. Judge Kurt Englehardt said he'd decide whether to accept that agreement after reading a pre-sentencing report that has not been made public.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/04/25/once-fugitive-real-estate-heir-robert-durst-eyes-los-angeles-area-prison.html

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A mixed month for real estate across Miami-Dade, Broward

March was a mixed month for Miami-Dade real estate, according to data released Wednesday by Miami-Dade Realtors.

Compared to March 2015, the median sale price of single-family homes in Miami-Dade increased by 7.7 percent, from $260,000 to $280,000, while prices of existing condos slid by 2.5 percent, to $215,000 from $209,500 in the previous year.

EWM Realty International broker Chris Zoller attributes the slump in condo prices to the “simple fact that developers are selling new product.”

“If you have money for both [a new car and a used car], what are you going to buy? Like most people, you’re going to look to buy a new product,” he said.

The volume of sales in Miami-Dade also dropped. Single-family home sales decreased 5.8 percent from March 2015, with 1,240 sales this year versus 1,168 in the same month of 2015. Sales of condos declined by nearly twice as much, falling 11.5 percent, from 1,466 in March 2015 to 1,297.

Meanwhile in Broward, median sale prices increased across the board, with single-family prices up 2.9 percent over March 2015 and condo prices up 5.8 percent year-over-year. The number of sales in Broward increased by 2.9 percent for single-family homes, from 1,399 to 1,440, and 5.4 percent for condos/townhouses, from 1,544 sales to 1,628, according to data released by Broward Realtors.

“Miami-Dade has slowed down, specifically due to the strong dollar and the economy of Latin America. When the Latins are looking at currency valuations that have resulted in an . . . increase in price, it has had a profound effect on [sales],” said Phil Spiegelman, principal of ISG World. “But this isn’t the first time . . . political unrest in Latin America has had effect on the South Florida real estate market,” and markets will readjust, he added.

Spiegelman and Zoller predict that both sales and prices across Miami-Dade will return to an upward trajectory in the coming months.

Miami-Dade inventory grew in March, with an increase of 8.2 percent for single-family homes and 15.9 percent for condos. Single-family homes fall just short of the six-month supply considered a healthy threshold, while condos surpass it almost twofold with a 10.8-month supply.

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article72950247.html

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How an online real estate company optimized its Hadoop clusters?

San Francisco-based online residential real estate company Trulia lives and dies by data. To compete successfully in today's housing market, it must deliver the most up-to-date real estate information available to its customers. But until recently, doing so was a daily struggle.

Acquired by online real estate database company Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion, Trulia is one of the largest online residential real estate marketplaces around, with more than 55 million unique site visitors each month.

Hadoop at heart

With so much data to store and process, the company adopted Hadoop in 2008 and it has since become the heart of Trulia's data infrastructure. The company has expanded usage of Hadoop to an entire data engineering department consisting of several teams using multiple clusters. This allows Trulia to deliver personalized recommendations to customers based on sophisticated data science models that analyze more than a terabyte of data daily. That data is drawn from new listings, public records and user behavior, all of which is then cross-referenced with search criteria to alert customers quickly when new properties become available.

To make it all work, throughout each night, the company must complete dozens of workflows and hundreds of complex jobs on time. With many teams writing Hadoop jobs or using Hive or Spark concurrently, Trulia has to ensure reliability in its multi-tenant, multi-workload environment. Delayed or unpredictable jobs throw a wrench in the works and can seriously affect the bottom line. Until recently, that meant Trulia had to intentionally underutilize its Hadoop clusters to ensure jobs completed on time.

"We process, on a daily basis, over a terabyte of new information: public records, listings, user activity," says Zane Williamson, senior DevOps engineer at Trulia. "We process this data across multiple Hadoop clusters and use the information to send out email and push notifications to our users. That's the lead driver to get users back to the site and interacting. It's very important that it gets done in a daily fashion. Reliability and uptime for the workflows is essential."

"It's been a pretty painful process, I think," Williamson adds, noting that he joined Trulia relatively recently. "It's been a pretty big challenge to reliably run this data cycle, maintain uptime and troubleshoot issues. Troubleshooting issues could sometimes take days to dial in on."

Sprinkle with Pepperdata

To ease that pain and achieve more reliable Hadoop job completion, Trulia turned toPepperdata, a specialist in adaptive Hadoop performance that guarantees quality of service on Hadoop.

Pepperdata provides a granular view of everything happening across your Hadoop clusters, actively governing use of CPU, memory, disk I/O and network for every task, job, user and group. For Trulia, the pièce de résistance was Pepperdata's newest feature — the capability to turn any trackable metric into an alert defined at any level of granularity, from cluster, to node, user, queue, job or task.

"We're watching how every application on the cluster is actually using the hardware," says Sean Suchter, co-founder and CEO of Pepperdata. "If there is any contention between some high priority thing and some computationally expensive ad-hoc thing, we'll detect that and slow down or otherwise affect the low priority thing just enough to give a consistent, high quality of service to the high priority thing."

"The performance gains we get scale pretty well with the chaos of the cluster," he adds. "The more chaos you have, the more applications you run, the more different tenants you have, the better we can do. We're able to react in a second-by-second fashion and do a lot of optimization. The opportunity goes higher the more complex the environment is."

Pepperdata has used the alerting feature to create detailed notifications to proactively track performance metrics across its Hadoop environment. Between dashboards and the alerting functions, Trulia is now able to identify problems much easier and faster. With the new visibility, the company has been able to optimize its Hadoop usage and maximize utilization.

"We rolled out Pepperdata last year," Williamson says. "It's been an amazing tool for us to diagnose problems. Within hours, rather than days, we could zoom in on what was going on and make changes."

He notes that Trulia now uses Pepperdata to manage five different Hadoop clusters, range from a dozen nodes to more than 40. There's about 2 petabytes of data across all the clusters. The company also has a number of clusters on AWS that are not yet managed by Pepperdata because they're used for batch-driven EMR workloads that aren't persistent. But he's working with the Pepperdata team to bring those clusters under Pepperdata management too.

"It's definitely on my roadmap," he says. "I feel like I'm running blind here."

 Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/real-estate-market-psychology-1.3537384

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Alberta property markets could be a buying opportunity, but maybe not yet

What a fabulous buying opportunity. Or is it? After years of sharp price increases, the costs of Calgary houses are finally down nearly four per cent from where they were a year ago.

While real estate company statistics show prices and sales continuing to climb across the country, a number of markets have turned, offering Canadians a useful experiment in the behavioural economics of the housing market.

·         Canadian housing market sets all-time record for sales and prices in March

·         Real estate 'chaos' sends millennials scrambling before they're priced out

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a piece saying that house prices could fall like oil. The point was not to predict a property market crash, it was merely to remind us that the smartest people in the oil industry failed to predict the current tumble in energy prices that now seems so obvious.

Unsatisfied demand

At the time, the response from many was that a property market crash could not happen, simply because there were so many people waiting to get into the market. As soon as prices declined, those hungry house hunters would respond by snapping up anything that was offered.

According to long time investment adviser and real estate guru Hilliard MacBeth, the bargain hunting in Alberta has already started.

"I've heard of lots of people who say, 'The prices are down. I'm going to jump in,'" said MacBeth, Edmonton-based author of When the Bubble Bursts.

In fact, some of the people he advises have already identified a buying opportunity and jumped into the market, at least on behalf of their kids, who they are helping out in the role of bank of mom and dad.

"I would have counselled them against it," said MacBeth by phone as he put on his ski boots in the Lake Louise parking lot. "I would have said, 'Wait,' because we're early days yet."

Lagging indicator

Housing is considered to be what's called a "lagging indicator," meaning that real estate markets only respond long after the economy has started to go sour. 

And according to Calgary-based behavioural economist Robert Oxoby, that's at least partly due to something behavioural economists refer to as "loss aversion" by current home owners.

Behavioural economists love to point out when conventional market rules are overturned by psychology. Especially when human behaviour makes us act contrary to our own interests.

Normally, economic theory tells us that when things get cheaper, we buy more. When things become more expensive, we buy less. In the property market, that often turns upside down.

"There's a lot of herd behaviour here. We behave like cattle," said Oxoby, a professor at the University of Calgary.

"People see the prices going up, and they go, 'Oh, shit, I better buy a house now before it gets worse.'"

Fraser Valley rising

In a place like B.C.'s Fraser Valley, where prices have risen 27 per cent this year, following the herd doesn't look so stupid.

"Speculative fervour thrives on expectations of rapidly rising prices — rising rapidly enough that buyers find it rational to make bets they could not normally afford," said a writer for The Economist discussing not houses but the price of baseball cards.

It is on the way down when loss aversion kicks in, this time hurting people who want or need to get out of the market. 

"When the value of that house is high, they tend to view that as a gain," said Oxoby.

Loss aversion makes sellers refuse to sell, preferring instead to wait until house prices bounce back again. 

The problem arises when that bounce-back fails to happen. And the people it hurts most are those who bought just before the downturn began, when the market was at a peak.

"So, what happens is as prices start to fall even more, people get trapped with those big assets that they have a lot of debt on but aren't worth as much anymore," said Oxoby.

MacBeth calls the price the seller expects to obtain the "anchor price" and says the refusal to accept anything lower seizes up the market. That's because buyers are expecting a bargain.

He says that the conflict between high selling prices and low offers, demonstrated in the current slowdown in sales in places like Calgary, can take a long time to resolve itself, often only does so after banks begin to call in loans, forcing foreclosure sales at the true market price. Thus the lag.

According to colleagues in Calgary, the market for houses priced at less than $500,000 is stronger than more expensive offerings, but as thelatest figures show, the entire market is slow.

Timing the market

For prospective buyers, suddenly, the challenge is exactly opposite from what it was a few years ago. Instead of being forced to buy before prices become unattainable, they wait, wondering when the market will hit bottom, fearful that further declines will wipe out their down payment and leave them owing more than they own.

There is only so much people in other parts of Canada can learn from housing markets devastated by falling energy prices.

"One of the things that was supporting Alberta home prices was the fact that our incomes were 40 to 50 per cent higher than the rest of Canada, and that's changing very rapidly," said MacBeth.

But property owners and prospective buyers elsewhere would be wise to watch and see if, indeed, the plunge is nipped in the bud by bargain hunters or whether prices continue to fall for a while yet

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/real-estate-market-psychology-1.3537384

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A change coming in the commercial real estate market?

A change is in the air. I can feel it. We have experienced a rather robust commercial real estate market since 2010 and a heated market since January 2013. But my senses tell me that our market is changing.

Why do I channel this premonition you may ask? I look at four metrics – residential activity, inbound calls, buyer/tenant reaction, and lender behavior.

This is an unscientific opinion and not based on any empirical data – just a guy reading the tea leaves; someone who has seen his fair share of commercial real estate activity for the past four decades.

Residential activity

I bumped into a young residential agent and friend of mine a few weeks ago and asked how things were going with his practice. I expected to hear “things have never been better, we are sooo busy, etc.” What he said startled me: we have a lack of entry level homes, affordability is at an all-time low; there is no place for trade-up buyers to move; banks are behaving conservatively (he actually said “getting a loan these days is a nightmare”). I marked the date carefully, as my experience suggests we would encounter a similar slowdown in six to nine months.

Inbound call activity

Signs, listings in the multiples, social media, newspaper columns, internet ads. All are meant to generate inbound call activity from potential occupants and cooperating brokers. The holidays are traditionally slow. But once the calendar dawns a new year and folks get back to work, the calls start with a vengeance. Not this year. This January was fraught with China’s implosion, the stock market declines, the presidential primary season, and plunging commodity prices. Call volume this year has been tepid at best.

Buyer/tenant reaction

In a healthy market a buyer or tenant outlines their wish list: find a building with X amount of square footage, this percentage of office space and in this location. We then busy ourselves finding said building.

Once found, the properly motivated occupant submits an offer and negotiations soon result in a new home for the business. Today, we see a lack of reaction even when the seemingly perfect opportunity arises. My suspicion is that something in the business owner’s crystal ball is causing concern. Possibly sales are flat, his industry is contracting, a piece of business he counted on cratered, or he is uncomfortable with prices. Regardless, this lack of reaction portends a changing market.

Lender behavior

In 2008, leading up to the great recession, we witnessed a change in the way banks underwrote loans. In the freewheeling years preceding 2008, we were spoiled. A bank might look at a business’ customer that represented a big piece of sales and assume it wasn’t a deal killer if there were long term agreements in place. As 2008 progressed, banks became concerned with the business’ ability to repay if the customer was lost. Beginning in 2011, lenders loosened their restrictions. Recently, we have noticed a shift back toward conservative underwriting. Now, as in 2008, lenders seem to look for reasons not to loan vs. reasons to loan.

But what about all of the contradicting data? Folks asked the same question at the beginning of 2008 as we sped toward the cliff a’la “Thelma & Louise.” Am I predicting a catastrophic end to this year? No, but there are enough data points to cause a bit of concern and proceed cautiously through the next few months.

Allen Buchanan is a principal and commercial real estate broker at Lee & Associates, Orange. He can be reached at 714.564.7104 or abuchanan@lee-associates.com. His website is www.allencbuchanan.com

Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/market-711925-activity-business.html

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Could the San Francisco real estate market finally be slowing down?

That sound you hear may be some air finally escaping from the inflated San Francisco real estate market.

Home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area fell by 1.8% year-over-year in March, the first such drop in four years, according to Redfin , a Seattle-based real estate brokerage. “For years, San Francisco has been one of — if not the most — competitive markets in the country,” said Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson. “Now we are seeing this white-hot market start to cool and contract,” she said. Richardson noted that the share of Redfin properties facing multiple offers by buyers dropped to 77% in March from 94% compared to a year ago, Richardson added. “This suggests that the price drop is not about inventory, it’s about buyers fed up with high Bay Area prices and crazy competition,” she said.

In the city of San Francisco, the median value of homes has skyrocketed, from $670,000 at the beginning of 2012 to $1.12 million in April , a gain of more than 67%, according to Zillow.com, which puts the gain in the past year alone at 11%, though down from its year-over-year estimate of 14% in February. Last fall, a derelict two-bedroom, one-bath earthquake shack, built in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, sold for more than $400,000, 17% above its asking price. In addition, a similar fixer-upper along San Francisco’s famed Great Highway overlooking the Pacific Ocean, within walking distance of the city zoo and Golden Gate Park, sold for $1.2 million.

Brian Tran, a realtor in San Francisco with Vanguard Properties (who represented the seller for the 1906 earthquake shack) said he’s noticed a bit of a slowdown, but only in condominiums. “We are selling a little less when it comes to condos,” he said. “There are a number of large projects that have come on the market recently that have increased the supply and lessened the competition.” Single family homes though “are hotter than ever,” Tran said, especially in the East Bay, as buyers flock to less expensive homes in Oakland and Berkeley.

Zillow isn’t the only company predicting a slowdown in San Francisco’s real estate market. Just two months ago, John Burns Real Estate Consulting of Irvine, Calif., and Pacific Union, a San Francisco real-estate brokerage, said that the Bay Area’s rapid property-value and rental-cost appreciation could suffer a repeat of the dot-com bust of 2000.

“The San Francisco Bay Area is on our watch list for a correction,” Burns said in February, noting what he said was a correlation between declining venture capital awards and real estate prices in the Bay Area, where many tech workers are paid in bonuses and stock options, and suffered greatly during the collapse of the tech industry just over 15 years ago.

In a separate report in February, Fitch Ratings’

 managing director, Grant Bailey, said that home prices in the Bay Area had climbed to an all-time high in the third quarter of 2015 and were 10% above their prior peak in 2005 and 62% above their post-recession low of early 2012. “(H)ome prices are roughly 16% overvalued relative to the underlying supporting economic fundamentals,” Bailey said.

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And it’s not just San Francisco. Redfin says pressure has been mounting in markets across the country with month-after-month of price growth, high competition and chronically low inventory. Nationwide, prices were up 4.7 % year-over-year in March, but sales grew only 1%, the smallest increase in 16 months. Despite 6.8% growth in new listings, overall inventory fell 3.2%, an indication that inventory is not keeping up with buyer demand, Redfin said.

Nationally, demand has outpaced supply since early 2015, when inventory began to drop sharply in many metro areas and home sales rose even faster. In hot markets like Seattle, Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., which saw double-digit year-over-year sales growth in 2015, sales are now falling as a result of steep inventory declines.

“In 2015, sales grew 7% nationally, but there simply aren’t enough homes for sale to maintain such a torrid pace again this year,” said Richardson. “No matter how high home buyer demand is, it takes two to tango, and many sellers are sitting this year out,” she said.

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/could-the-san-francisco-real-estate-market-finally-be-slowing-down-2016-04-15

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