Ingersoll is also the author of “Real Estate Tsunami Survivor’s Guide,” which is available on Amazon HERE.
Give Me That Old-Time Religion
[The Registry October 2011 Issue]
In the last 60-odd days Standard & Poor’s woke up and smelled the coffee not once, but thrice. First S&P yanked its seal of approval from the $1.5 billion commercial-mortgage backed bond deal underwritten by Goldman Sachs & Co. and Citigroup Global Markets Inc. The so-called “GC4 transaction” was then scuttled in late July. This had the immediate impact of shrinking the availability of commercial loans and increasing the cost of money.
[The Registry September 2011 Issue]
I wake every morning and thank my lucky stars that I live in the Bay Area, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise gloomy national economy. Never mind that we are also struggling with more than 9 percent unemployment, we are creating jobs and freshly-minted millionaires, some of whom have even begun to shave. But is our recovery a false dawn?
[The Registry July/August 2011 Issue]
Summer is here and that means baseball, theme parks and roller coasters. Those monster twirling, spinning and careening rides are the favorites of teenagers, but the truly terrifying ride, the mother of all roller coasters is the Double Dipper. This ride makes even bankers in air-conditioned, corner offices sweat uncontrollably and prompts otherwise cool-headed Treasury officials to fervently polish their resumes, hoping for a plum Wall Street position as a plunderer rather than protector.
[The Registry June 2011 Issue]
The fortunes of the haves and have-nots have long interested social scientists. Real estate investors, especially Main Street owners, are more recent comers to the action, but their interest is well-founded. At the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center conference in Philadelphia on April 28, David Simon—a guy who should know—shared some particularly relevant and interesting insights about the have and have-not world of today.
[The Registry May 2011 Issue]
Up ahead there must be water; I can see it on the horizon! My fellow real estate practitioners and I have been trudging through a Sahara of deal flow for a number of years. Small, private investors trudge along beside us, all looking for any deal with some meat on the bones.
[The Registry April 2011 Issue]
An illusionist’s primary tool is distraction: We are made to look left when to the right he is palming the ace of spades. So, too, is the Federal Reserve engaged in creating an illusion. Ben Bernanke and his brethren are doing all they can to direct our attention to the high level of unemployment as the reason for the massive quantitative easing taking place. Yet, the real trick is to reflate property values without awakening the inflation dragon.
[The Registry March 2011 Issue]
Vince Lombardi, the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, began every summer training camp by saying to veterans and rookies alike: “This is a football!” Lombardi was big on training fundamentals, and you can't get much more fundamental than peering at the pigskin.
[The Registry February 2011 Issue]
Waiting for the logjam of distressed loans to break and flood the market with commercial buying opportunities reminds me of a Gary Larson cartoon where two spiders have woven a web at the bottom of a child’s playground slide. One says to the other: “If this works, we eat like kings!”
[The Registry January 2011 Issue]
One nuance that investors forgot in the price bubble of 2004 to 2008 (really a debt bubble) was that commercial real estate is not homogenous across place or product; neither is debt-financing.
[The Registry November/December 2010 Issue]
As horrible as the bubonic plague was for Europe in the 1300s—nearly a third of the population died—it set the stage for centuries of economic growth because all the land and productive capacity were now owned by fewer people, and wealth became more concentrated.
Learn Inuit to Understand Inflation
[The Registry October 2010 Issue]
Urban legend tells us that the Eskimos have more than 100 words to describe snow. That's a lot of different snowflakes! If one of the primary fears of commercial real estate investors is a multiple-year, blizzard of inflation and the accompanying wealth-smothering drifts of worthless fiat currency, then we need more than a single word to describe inflation too.
[The Registry September 2010 Issue]
The consensus, or perhaps fear, among real estate investors with whom I talk is that interest rates must, must, must go up. At current levels, it is difficult to conceive that rates could possibly fall further.
[July 26, 2010]
When I was 13 my juvenile delinquent friends and I bribed a college kid into buying a case of beer, which we drank under an enormous weeping willow in the soft summer night hidden by a canopy of leaves. My first reaction was: “How do adults stand this nasty stuff?”
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