U.S. Mid-Market Hotel Transactions More Than Doubled First Half of 2010

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Vivian Chen| Leave a comment

HVS reports that the total number of major and mid-market U.S. hotel transactions more than doubled in the first half of 2010. The rise is expected to continue to rise through the rest of the year, after a heavy fall in 2009.

Dallas, Texas, September 7, 2010: Hotel transactions activity in the U.S. rose from 29 sales in the first half of 2009 to 73 in the first half of 2010, according to the HVS 2010 Mid-Year Survey of Major and Mid-Market U.S. Hotel Transactions. The survey details confirmed hotel sales of $10 million and above (major) and hotel sales between $3.0 and $9.99 million (mid-market) that occurred in the first half of 2010.

A total of 9,521 hotel rooms traded hands in the major price category, totaling more than $1.6 billion in sales volume. In the mid-market price category, 3,116 rooms traded hands, totaling nearly $158 million in sales volume. These figures represent an increase in both total sales volume and rooms transacted for each category in the first six months of 2010 over 2009 levels.

“Given the improvements not only in the lending environment but also in market and hotel performance metrics, we expect transactions activity to continue to increase in 2010,” said Amy Beam, HVS Director of Hotel Transactions. “Luxury and upper-upscale hotels have noted marked gains in both occupancy and average rate in 2010 compared with last year, giving investors more confidence in the market for U.S. hotels.”

Highlights of the survey include:

• An overview of the hotel transactions market through June of 2010;
• An illustration of major and mid-market hotel transactions activity by month in the first half of 2010;
• A quarterly breakdown of transactions activity by price per room and total sales price;
• The five largest hotel transactions in each price category; and
• A listing of all confirmed hotel transactions as of July of 2010, including property name, location, buyer, seller, sale date, and selling price.

The trend in increase of transaction activities holds true as well in asset transactions $10 million and above (excluding note sales, recapitalizations, and foreclosures). According to a Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels’ proprietary database published in an artivle in July, the volume of U.S. hotel transactions for the first six months of 2010 eclipsed $2.2 billion, increasing 153% from the same period in 2009. Portfolio transactions increased in 2010 compared to 2009 and REITs accounted for 51% of hotel purchases by volume. JLLH forecasts the U.S. transaction volume to total between $4 and $4.5 bullion for 2010, up from its previous forecast of $3.5 billion.

This is positive news for the industry. However, both reports did not specify whether these increases in transactions volume are caused by U.S. investors or foreign investors. Are the transactions growth driven by confidence in investors at home, or are they propelled by the growing investing capital of foreign investors and foreign corporations who see investments in U.S. hotel real estate as opportunities for diversification and shelter from their less socially stable political environment at home?

For example, foreign investors have been shopping for investment properties throughout the west coast of United States. According to an article from SFGate.com, Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco was up for sale and there is strong likelihood that it will be bought by an investor from Asia. Domestic investors are cautious about where they put their money when foreign investors see opportunities in a U.S. real estate market that is currently so beat down. California has a national record high of hotel defaults in the past 2 years. With so many distressed properties in the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas, change of ownership may prove necessary. This does not only apply to hotel properties, but other commercial real estate properties as well. In commercial real estate where supply in inelastic & kinked, default on so  many properties comes with no surprise. It will be a space market restructuring, on local-regional-national-global levels, for years to come.

Wednesday, Sep. 15, 2010

What Your Cell Phone Could Be Telling the Government

By Adam Cohen

Smart phones do many things these days: surf the Internet, send e-mail, take photos and video (and — oh, yes — send and receive calls). But one thing they can do that phone companies don’t advertise is spy on you. As long as you don’t leave home without your phone, that handy gadget keeps a record of everywhere you go — a record the government can then get from your telephone company.

The law is unclear about how easy it should be for the government to get its hands on this locational data — which can reveal whether you’ve been going to church, attending a Tea Party rally, spending the night at a date’s house or visiting a cancer-treatment center. A federal appeals court ruled last week that in some cases the government may need a search warrant. And while that’s a step forward, it’s not good enough. The rule should be that the government always needs a warrant to access your cell-phone records and obtain data about where you have been. (See TIME’s cell-phone-radiation report card.)

When you carry a cell phone, it is constantly sending signals about where you are. It “pings” nearby cell-phone towers about every seven seconds so it can be ready to make and receive calls. When it does, the phone is also telling the company that owns the towers where you are at that moment — data the company then stores away indefinitely. There is also a second kind of locational data that phone companies have, thanks to a GPS chip that is embedded in most smart phones now. This is even more accurate — unlike the towers, which can only pinpoint a general area where you may be, GPS can often reveal exactly where you are at any given moment within a matter of meters.

There are some good reasons for this, which is why the government is actually forcing the phone companies to do a better job of knowing where you are. In the name of improving emergency services, the Federal Communications Commission will require phone companies to meet benchmarks in 2012 for how closely they can pinpoint a caller’s location. “About 90% of Americans are walking around with a portable tracking device all the time, and they have no idea,” says Christopher Calabrese, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington, D.C., office. (Read “The iPhone Jailbreak: A Win Against Copyright Creep.”)

Not surprisingly, law enforcement has found this sort of data extremely handy. Prosecutors are increasingly using cell-phone records to show that a suspect was near the scene of a crime — or not where he claimed to be. (See the 25 crimes of the century.)

The Federal Government’s position is that it should be able to get most of this data if it decides it is relevant to an investigation, with no need for a search warrant. If the government needs a warrant, it would have to show a judge evidence that there was probable cause to believe that the cell-phone user committed a crime — an important level of protection. Without this requirement, the government can get locational data pretty much anytime it wants.

It is not hard to imagine that the government could also one day use cell-phone data to stifle dissent. Cell-phone records could tell them who attended an antigovernment rally. It could also tell them who is going into the opposition party’s headquarters or into the home of someone they have questions about. Cell-phone data may be the most efficient way ever invented for a government to spy on its people — since people are planting the devices on themselves and even paying the monthly bills. The KGB never had anything like it.

And, indeed, the U.S. government already appears to be sweeping up a lot of data from completely innocent people. The ACLU recently told Congress of a case in which, while looking for data on a suspect, the FBI apparently used a dragnet approach and took data on another 180 people. The FBI has said that if it does happen to gather data on innocent people in the course of conducting an investigation, it keeps that information for as long as 20 years. (Comment on this story.)

Last week, the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit pushed back. A federal magistrate judge, in a good and strong decision, had ruled that the government must always get a warrant if it wants cell-phone data. The appeals court scaled that back a bit, ruling that magistrate judges have the power to require the government to get a warrant, depending on the facts of the particular case.

The fight over cell-phone tracking is similar to one now going on in the courts over GPS devices — specifically, whether the government needs a warrant to place a GPS device on someone’s car. (The courts are sharply divided on the question.) Cell-phone tracking is of far bigger consequence, however, because there is a limit to how many GPS devices police are going to put on cars. Nine out of 10 of us have cell phones that will do the tracking for the government.

The House of Representatives has been holding hearings on this issue and related ones, and a Senate hearing next week is likely to consider it further. It is time for Congress to act. It should amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to make clear that information from our cell phones about where we are and where we have been is deeply private — and that without a search warrant, the government cannot have it.

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board. His legal column appears every Wednesday on TIME.com.

See TIME’s photographic history of the cell phone.

See TIME’s 10 ways to stay connected on the road.

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orlandosentinel.com/business/os-cvs-industrial-sale-091610-20100915,0,5676191.story

OrlandoSentinel.com

Giant CVS warehouse sells

By Mary Shanklin, Orlando Sentinel

10:55 AM EDT, September 15, 2010

CB Richard Ellis negotiated the sale Tuesday of the 713,585-quare-foot CVS Warehouse near West Oak Ridge Road, marking the largest sale of an industrial building in Orlando in the last decade.

Orlando CBRE Senior Vice President David Murphy, along with the firm’s Atlanta Investment Sales Team of Frank Fallon, Chris Riley, and Brian Budnick, represented Pacific Life Insurance Co. in the sale of the distribution warehouse distribution facility on Chancellor Drive in Orlando.

The property, which was fully leased at the time of sale, was purchased by Liberty Property Trust. The space had been built for as a Walgreens distribution space and CVS has leased it in recent years.

“This asset fits into our strategy of owning high quality office and industrial properties,” said Stephen Whitley, senior vice president of Liberty Property Trust. “We think this might be the best location for a distribution center in Florida, and it is leased to a great company.”

Copyright © 2010, Orlando Sentinel

Location, location, location… 

Timing, timing, timing… 

Tishman Speyer’s Infinity phase II is down to one penthouse after selling a 3,300-square-foot unit on the 42nd floor for $5.2 million. The price was $1,576 a square foot, about a 25 percent discount from the $6.9 million that Gurbaksh Chahal — the Silicon Valley entrepreneur known as “G” — paid in 2008 for a similarly sized condo on the 37th floor.

Read more at the San Francisco Business Times

Categories: Commercial Real Estate, Residential Real Estate

Tags: San Francisco

Companies: Tishman Speyer

People: Gurbaksh Chahal

Read more: Infinity penthouse sells for $5.2M – San Francisco Business Times

Debt down, but so are credit scores

San Francisco Business Times – by Steven E.F. Brown

Though consumer credit card debt is down 3 percent since January, people’s credit scores are worse.

San Francisco-based CreditKarma, which tracks such things, blamed this quixotic circumstance on “a strange mix of economic conditions.”

Persistent high unemployment and a real estate market that’s in the toilet have both hurt credit scores even though people are slowly paying off debt. Credit scores are down 2 points on average since the start of the year.

In California, consumers have typically cut their credit card debt by 6 percent since the start of the year. The Golden State is one of 11 U.S. states where average credit card debt has dropped by at least 5 percent since January. New Hampshire tops the list with an 11 percent drop.

Despite the rather gloomy news, California is tied with New Jersey and Massachusetts for the highest average credit score in the country, 685. A higher credit score is a better one.

Arkansas has the lowest average credit score at 640.

Nationally, the average consumer with a credit card in August had:

• $7,694 in credit card debt
• $174,447 in home mortgage loans
• $51,721 in home equity
• $15,186 in car loans
• $28,183 in student loans.

Ken Lin is CEO of CreditKarma

Read more: Debt down, but so are credit scores – San Francisco Business Times

The property, located at 1583 Atwood Ave., sold for $5,526,315 to Velvet Mill Properties, LLC a New England based investor. The property has frontage along Rte. 5. It is part of an approved, mixed-use project comprised of retail, office, medical and residential uses.

                                               The City Place Project

Mid Market project serves city divesity

The project envisions a five story building between 5th and 6th on market added 250,000 sqft of retail space. Stevenson street would also get an upgrade as the area would be designated for micro vendors.

The entire project respects the neighborhood by offering retail space for value vendors and creating vendor space on Stevenson for a few startups to gain entry small storefront business’s.

The developers, Urban Realty, estimate the project would create up to 250 consruction jobs and 760 new retail positions. We are committed to utilizing the local workforce
A yes vote to accept the appeal for an enviromental impact study would give San Francisco a face lift and create jobs.

The City Place project will be before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, September 14 at 2:30pm. For more information or questions about CityPlace, please contact them at info@discovercityplace.com or 415.655.7495.

Thanks for Reading

www.yourpropertypath.com

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