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Multifamily Housing Developers Inch Back Into Market – WSJ.com
Mar 3rd
Multifamily Housing Developers Inch Back Into Market – WSJ.com.
In St. Petersburg, Fla., close by Tropicana Field, an unusual structure is emerging from a construction site: a rental apartment building.
The work in progress on the Fusion 1560, a 325-unit upscale project in one of the states hit hardest by the housing crisis, is a sign that developers of multifamily housing are tiptoeing back into the business. This year, real-estate investment trusts, or REITs, are expected to start close to $1 billion in new multifamily projects, according to real-estate research firm Green Street Advisors. While that still is less than average, it is a significant increase over the $100 million of development starts in 2009.
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Analysts caution that the increase in construction doesn’t mean there has been an improvement in the business. Apartment vacancy is at a record and unemployment, essential to the sector’s health, remains elevated.
But operators are betting that limited new supply, combined with an improving economy, will lead to ideal market conditions nationwide starting in 2011 or 2012. From then until 2015, “apartment REITs may generate the best property net operating income growth that they’ve seen in a very long time, maybe ever,” said Haendel St. Juste, a REIT analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc.
To be sure, there are risks. Given the multiyear construction window, companies have to start now to be ready in time. If the economy weakens further and recovery is delayed, landlords may be forced to keep rents low or offer free rent to get leases signed.
“There’s an element of risk,” said Andrew McCulloch, an analyst with Green Street. “But if you were to go back a year, the outlook is much more clear today. Their confidence level in that eventual recovery is much higher.”
Owners said the rent declines appear to have bottomed out in some areas and concessions are moderating. In New York, Equity Residential said it has stopped paying broker fees for certain unit types. In better times tenants pay that fee, typically one month’s rent.
The gap between new and renewal leases has narrowed from about 10% nine months ago to about 5% today, a sign of confidence as landlords have to give up less to sign new tenants, Mr. St. Juste said.
Landlords also are excited about demand. The 20-to-34 age group, prime renting age, is expected to increase by five million in the next decade, according to Hessam Nadji, managing director of Marcus & Millichap, a real-state-investment brokerage firm. People who moved home or who bunked with roommates during the downturn also might ink leases as the economy improves.
Moreover, construction costs “have fallen rapidly in the last two years,” said Tom Toomey, chief executive of apartment owner UDR Inc. A unit that would have cost $300,000 to build two years ago could now be built for as little as $220,000, Mr. Toomey said.
Lumber prices have been cut 15%, while concrete prices are down 10%, he said. Labor costs have fallen as much as 15%. Starting development now “is starting to become an easier decision,” Mr. Toomey said.
The sector’s optimism was apparent in January’s housing starts. Construction of multifamily dwellings rose 9.2%, the Commerce Department said.
At Humphreys & Partners Architects LP in Dallas, which designs apartments, inquires and job counts have more than doubled from a year earlier, said Chief Executive Mark Humphreys. “This time last year the financial world had come to an end,” Mr. Humphreys said. “Everybody was frozen in time; they were just stunned. The phone was not ringing. Well, the phone is ringing now.”
Developers said they are avoiding Las Vegas and Phoenix, which were overbuilt during the housing frenzy, in favor of more stable markets, including Washington, Boston and San Francisco.
In 2011, AvalonBay Communities Inc. plans to complete six projects with more than 2,100 units in locations including Walnut Creek, Calif., New York and West Long Branch, N.J. The rents will average more than $2,000 a month, according to securities filings.
Equity Residential, meanwhile, plans to deliver 111 units in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood in late 2011.
Developers also are using conservative projections when planning projects. Zaremba Group, which is building Fusion 1560, is targeting rents between $925 and $2,300 a month in 2011, when it hopes to be fully leased. Mr. Zaremba said that matches the current market.
“We’re not banking on [rent increases],” he said.
Sam Zell’s Realistic Forecast for 2010
Feb 4th
Real estate mogul billionaire Sam Zell looked past 2010 and made predictions for 2011 and — in the case of new development — laid out a forecast all the way to 2015.
The outlook?
Well, it wasn’t necessarily good. Some would only go so far as to say it was “positive,” or “cautiously optimistic.”
With exception for development — in which case, Zell zinged, developers may as well use the next five years to study in medical school.
Zell, the co-founder and chair of Equity Group Investments, gave his lively talk Friday at the Burnham Moores Center for Real Estate University of San Diego 14th Annual Real Estate Conference.
During his hour-long keynote, Zell chided the federal government for “changing the rules,” took a swipe at President Barack Obama’s 2,200-page health care overhaul, and, no stranger to colorful language, said, “To say we’ve come through a decade of spending too much fucking money would be an understatement.”
Oh, and, he delivered a thorough, some say spot-on look at what’s ahead in commercial estate, noting, “Reports of the demise of real estate have been greatly exaggerated.”
In his forecast, Zell predicted:
– Investors will make deals with commercial real estate owners, using investment capital to pay down an underwater mortgage in return for a favorable equity position in the project. “If there are opportunities in distressed real estate, it’s in buying the debt in return for equity,” he said.
– Occupancy rates will continue to improve, albeit slowly, and at 20-30 percent lower rental rates;
– Multi-family markets will continue to grow and improve through 2011. Zell said on some apartment complexes late last year Equity Residential had more than 40 bidders . “There’s a food fight today to buy assets,” he said;
– The retail and industrial markets will continue to be “survival of the fittest,” and “lifestyle center” – mixed use commercial developments – might as well be “converted into churches, on the theory there’s a lot of space, and based on (Zell’s) assessment, they’re very cheap”;
– New development is a very long way off. “Construction loans are not available today, and they’re very unlikely to be available tomorrow,” he said; and
– A single family market at equilibrium. “The number we see now are much greater impacted by very serious pockets of excess (overdevelopment), as opposed to the broad malaise that occurred a year ago,” he said. Also, he noted, regions including South Florida and cities like Davis, Stockton and San Diego, may see slower recovery, based on excessive inventory. “I don’t think the U.S. housing dream is over,” Zell said, “but if you look back over the last 40 years, every single time the percent of single-family home owners exceeded 62 percent, we got ourselves in trouble. This time, courtesy of subprime loans, we were up to 69 percent. Now we’re at 66 and we need to get to 63, 64 percent before we have a sustainable, affordable single-family market.”
Zell kicked off the event with harsh words for the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, saying there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty in large part because they are “changing the rules.” And, in order for full recovery, Zell said, “You need a clear concise understanding of what the rules are.”
“Today we find ourselves in the position where the definition of economic policy is designing new forms of bailouts, rather than focusing in on, and in effect, helping the economy grow,” Zell said. “This administration is picking winners and losers.”
Dr. Mark J. Riedy, executive director of the Burnham Moores Center for Real Estate, said he thought Zell’s forecast was “spot-on” and that “uncertainty is clouding things and inhibiting decision making.”
Riedy said he wasn’t the only one who agreed with Zell’s take.
“Generally, the people who approached me afterward said, ‘You know, Sam Zell hit it right on the nail,’” Riedy said. “Not that it was good news, but I like to say he was being realistic.”
Dr. John C. Ferber, director of commercial real estate at the center, said Zell has an “uncanny” knack for forecasting.
“I couldn’t find anything where I disagreed with him,” Ferber said.
Ferber called the prognosis “cautiously optimistic.”
“I thought there was some hope there,” he said.
Joseph Peña is the business editor for San Diego News Network. He can be reached at joseph.pena(at)sdnn.com. Follow him on Twitter @josephpena [1].
REITs Have Plenty of Cash, Scarce Opportunity
Feb 4th
FROM THE WSJ – By ANTON TROIANOVSKI
For public real-estate companies, spending money has turned out to be harder than raising it—even as some signs point to a pickup in big property deals.
Real-estate investment trusts sold $24 billion in new stock last year, raising hopes the companies would be able to profit from commercial-property distress by picking up high-quality real estate at bargain prices.
But publicly traded REITs bought only $4.6 billion of property in 2009, a 67% decline from the previous year, according to research firm Real Capital Analytics.
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With few deals happening and REIT shares now trading at twice their March lows, some executives regret last year’s money-raising binge.
“Today I’m sitting with $125 million in cash that I can’t find investment for,” Stephen Richter, chief financial officer of Weingarten Realty Investors, said in an interview. “If I would have known the markets are where they are today, I certainly wouldn’t have sold a third of the company.”
Weingarten, which owns shopping centers and warehouses in 23 states, sold about $380 million in stock last April, a time its shares were trading at less than half their value of a year before.
REITs are having difficulty doing deals partly because there is a dearth of product on the market. With commercial-property prices some 35% off their peak, most building owners are keeping their best assets off the market. Those properties that do go on the block are attracting a herd of buyers looking to snap up cheap real estate.
Many REIT executives and investors expected the volume of distressed buildings on the market to surge as owners defaulted and lenders foreclosed on property. But while the number of problem loans has been growing, so far this hasn’t translated into many fire sales. Banks have been willing to extend loans rather than foreclosing, and the firms that oversee commercial mortgages bundled into securities have also been slow to sell off distressed assets, market participants say.
“The volume of the properties that are truly distressed and will be sold in a distressed fashion will be significantly less than had initially been thought,” said Bob Steers, the co-chief executive of REIT investor Cohen & Steers Inc.
The scarcity of “for sale” signs has particularly roiled the market for “blind pool” REITs, which raise money from investors in order to build a new portfolio of real estate.
Last week, Terreno Realty Corp., which sought $200 million from investors to snap up warehouses on the cheap, postponed its initial public offering. Research firm Green Street Advisors recommended clients not participate in the offering because the ability “to acquire properties at discounts to underlying fair current-market value is likely to be limited” for industrial real estate. Through a spokeswoman, Terreno Chief Executive Blake Baird declined to comment.
Another prospective blind pool sputtered in December when shareholders in a blank-check company balked at turning their cash over to a management team that would use it to buy strip malls. “People, I think, fundamentally were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to generate the volume of acquisitions or investment opportunities to justify the investment in a blind pool,” said Bill Gerrity, who would have headed up the REIT. Instead, the $288 million blank-check company, Global Brands Acquisition Corp., said it would return its investors’ money.
The best opportunities for REITs may lie in sales of large portfolios by private investors who can’t access capital as readily as public companies. The bigger the portfolio and higher the price tag, the less the competition from other buyers.
In the biggest deal by a REIT since the downturn, mall landlord Simon Property Group Inc. in December said it would buy Prime Outlets, another shopping center owner, for $700 million. The sale gave Prime’s closely held parent, Lightstone Group LLC, cash to address the capital needs of its Extended Stay Hotels chain, which is now in bankruptcy protection.
In another big deal with a private owner, apartment giant Equity Residential on Monday announced a $475 million deal for three Manhattan buildings owned by debt-burdened New York City developer Harry Macklowe. One analyst said Equity Residential may have acquired the apartment buildings for half of what they would have gone for a few years ago.
“The advantage of access to capital will stay around for a while,” said Ross Smotrich, a REIT analyst at Barclays Capital.
But Equity Residential’s other recent deals show bargain-basement prices for high-quality real estate are rare even today, amid the worst commercial-property downturn in a generation. Chief Executive David Neithercut said the company would soon announce the acquisitions of two apartment buildings in the Washington, D.C., area and one in California. He declined to reveal the price paid but said the deals came in at less-eye-popping discounts than the Macklowe buildings.
The reason: Many others—from foreign buyers to private investors with cash to spend—also want to get in on the action.
In October, Equity Residential paid $100 million for a 326-unit apartment complex in Arlington, Va.. The property drew 160 interested parties and 40 offers, a level of interest that Alan Davis, a broker who represented the seller in the deal, said he couldn’t recall in several years of shopping multifamily properties in the Washington area.
Write to Anton Troianovski at anton.troianovski@wsj.com
TWO NEW COMPANIES COMING TO LAKEWOOD RANCH
Jan 4th
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JANUARY 4, 2010
NEW MERCHANTS AT LAKEWOOD RANCH
TWO NEW COMPANIES COMING TO LAKEWOOD RANCH
LWR Commercial Realty is pleased to announce the addition of two new merchants to Lakewood Ranch in two different locations.
Ming Wu Martial Arts has opened at the corner of Lorraine Road and SR 70, and The Fish Hole Adventure Golf will be opening on Main Street in the spring of 2010.
Ming Wu Martial Arts opens today, January 4th and owner Jessie Vi is an award winning martial artist and humanitarian who has been honored nationally for his skills. Step daughter and student, 15 year old Paige Oswald, a second degree black belt, was just recruited onto the United States National Martial Arts Team and will be one of the teachers at the school. “I am so excited to finally be opening a school in Lakewood Ranch,” said owner Jessie Vi. “It has been a long time dream to bring Ming Wu to such a family oriented neighborhood where so many children and adults can benefit from the exercise and discipline martial arts can offer. Ming Wu martial arts is open to anyone ages 3 to 103!” The Grand Opening special offers three weeks of classes for $19.95 and includes a free uniform.
In addition, through March, Jessie Vi will offer a free 30 minute martial arts class to the first 20 students who sign up on Saturday morning for the 10:15 to 10:45 class. Doors open at 9:00 AM.
The Fish Hole on Lake Uihlein is adventure outdoor miniature golf, and will begin construction on their facility which borders Lake Uihlein in February. Owner Jacob Spooner currently operates an adventure golf facility on Anna Maria Island and grew up in Manatee County. “We could not be more thrilled to be bringing adventure golf to Main Street at Lakewood Ranch,” said Spooner. “This type of family friendly activity crosses all borders and gives kids a fun, safe and exciting activity to enjoy all year round.” Julia DeCastro, on site property manager at Main Street could not agree more. “We are so thrilled to have more entertainment for families and kids, and we know The Fish Hole will be a popular spot!”
Spooner will also open a golf and novelty store called “Main Street Bazaar” just a few stores down from the golf course. That store is expected to open first in March.
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Lakewood Ranch is the 8,500-acre award winning master-planned community in Sarasota and Manatee counties on the West Coast of Florida. It is the largest Green-Certified community in the country. For more information on Lakewood Ranch, visit www.lakewoodranch.com.
Candice
Candice McElyea
Public Relations & Promotions Manager
Lakewood Ranch/SMR
941-757-1546 office
941-232-9046 cell
Tough times for Sarasota and Manatee commercial real estate
Jan 4th
By KEVIN L. McQUAID
Published: Monday, January 4, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.
STAFF PHOTO / CHIP LITHERLAND
It’s more difficult to borrow money, vacancies are up, values and rent are down and the key to a solution – jobs – could be years away.
To borrow a biblical expression, it may be easier these days to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to get a commercial real estate loan.
Despite federal bail-out money intended to stimulate lending, loans for investment in office buildings, shopping centers, industrial sites and raw land are increasingly rare, the result of falling values and other factors.
Commercial property owners and mortgage brokers say the lack of capital also stems, in part, from new federal regulations intended to staunch foreclosures and halt the aggressive lending practices of the early 2000s.
“It’s ironic that the federal government put all the stimulus money into banks, while another branch of the government is over-regulating capital reserve requirements on banks,” said Brett Hutchens, chief executive officer of Casto Lifestyle Properties, a Sarasota development firm that owns shopping and lifestyle centers nationwide.
“The same government is providing both the carrot and the stick to lenders,” Hutchens said. “It’s created gridlock and made lending and borrowing very, very difficult.”
“It’s a Catch-22 the government has imposed,” said N.J. Olivieri, president and owner of Sarasota-based Horizon Mortgage Corp. “They tell the banks to make loans but then tell the FDIC to tighten the restrictions on new lending.”
New regulations notwithstanding, lenders say the pullback in available credit is appropriate, given the shaky economy.
“Banks are simply not looking to take extended risk today,” said Charlie Murphy, chief executive of the Bank of Commerce, a Sarasota lender, and a board member of the Florida Bankers Association, a trade group.
“It’s not unusual for banks, in bad economic times, to tighten their lending standards,” Murphy said. “And regulators are not too happy these days about allocating new money to commercial real estate.”
Other forces
Banks have been hurt, as well, by other forces beyond their control.
Most notable has been the exit from the lending market by risk-averse insurers and pension funds, typically a key source for permanent mortgages.
That has crippled commercial real estate owners seeking to refinance or simply shift loans from banks, as is usually done.
That, in turn, has forced banks to keep mortgages on their books, which further limits their ability to cut new loans — especially in the construction and real estate sectors.
The precipitous drop in commercial real estate values — combined with falling rental rates on nearly every property segment — represents the largest factor in the dearth of lending, however.
Retail rental rates have fallen by as much as half, and many tenants remain unable to pay rent at all, part of the fallout from the longest economic recession since the Great Depression.
Vacancies, too, from super-regional malls to neighborhood-anchored strip centers, have risen dramatically.
“In many cases, shopping centers are full, but not all of the tenants are paying rent,” Olivieri said. “Landlords don’t want their space to go dark, so they’re letting them stay put.”
Office rents have also fallen, in Southwest Florida and nationwide — by 20 percent to 30 percent in some cases.
“In some submarkets, there is an even greater devaluation of rents,” said John Harshman, president of Harshman & Co., a Sarasota commercial real estate brokerage firm.
The lack of income, and decrease in values, has forced many property owners to come up with new equity on loans to satisfy lenders’ re-appraisals, investors say, even on performing mortgages.
Regulators, too, are calling on banks to beef up reserves and loan coverages by thinning loan-to-value ratios.
Restrictions
Meanwhile, the few commercial real estate loans that are available come with excessive restrictions, including onerous equity requirements and repayment schedules, which are also the result of new federal regulations.
In many cases, lenders that once required investors to put down 20 percent or 30 percent equity are demanding twice those percentages — and borrowers’ personal guarantees — before they will consider loaning money.
“We’ve gone from having an unsecured line of credit, on a performing loan, to getting a commitment for just one-year from the bank, and the terms are complex,” said Andy Dorr, a senior vice president with Githler Development Co., a Sarasota real estate investment and development firm.
As a result, Horizon and others have begun lining up equity partners for developers or investors, Olivieri said.
At the same time, Dorr said, the costs associated with commercial real estate borrowing — appraisals, origination fees, legal expenses and environmental analysis — have increased in many cases.
The hiked fees and the lack of new capital are both tied, investors and lenders say, to the fear that a commercial real estate meltdown is in the offing. Already, development giants such as mall owner General Growth Properties have defaulted on commercial real estate loans — a signal to some analysts that another wave of foreclosures is ahead. Next year alone, hundreds of billions of commercial real estate loans, many of which were cut during the real estate boom and required interest-only payments, will mature or come due nationwide. When that occurs, many predict, defaults will spike.
“Everyone keeps saying that commercial real estate is the next shoe to drop,” Hutchens said. “Well, I have to agree: It’s about to drop.”
The answer, industry experts say, can be summed up in a single word: Jobs.
“We have to stimulate the economy with more jobs and small business,” Murphy said. “When we have jobs, then businesses expand and the economy cycles upward. The opposite is also true, and it creates a vicious, self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“People have to go back to work,” Olivieri said. “Specifically, in construction.
“Construction has always led the way out of recession; it’s key. It starts the employment cycle, and then retailers hire and the cycle returns to supply and demand. But if you don’t have a job, if you don’t know where your next dollar is coming from, then you don’t spend,” Olivieri said.
Unfortunately, for Florida, that job growth may be a long time in coming.
Unemployment in Southwest Florida stands at 12.7 percent, slightly above the 11.5 percent statewide average, which is at the highest level since October 1975. Nationally, unemployment is just under 10 percent.
Even more dire are some economists’ predictions that Florida’s unemployment rate will not fall to 6 percent — within the range of a moderately healthy economy — until 2018.
If that proves true, experts believe commercial real estate will remain depressed well into the future.
“The 12 percent unemployment rate in Sarasota and Manatee counties, and the 10 percent rate nationally, will create more commercial real estate vacancies,” Harshman said. “And more vacancies will, in turn, further drive down commercial real estate values.”
This story appeared in print on page D6
Copyright © 2010 HeraldTribune.com — All rights reserved. Restricted use only.
Florida Home Prices See 4% Gain
Dec 29th
Hit hard by the housing downturn, Florida is one of two states that realized gains of more than 4 percent in home prices, according to a quarterly housing valuation analysis by IHS Global Insight.
In South Florida, prices started to inch up in the third quarter.
In the Miami metropolitan area, prices increased to an average of $191,200 from $182,900 in the previous quarter. However, they remain down significantly from the third quarter of 2007, when the average price was $312,600.
The Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area saw a slight improvement, with an average price in the third quarter of $148,000, up from $147,700 in the previous quarter, but still down from $248,600 in the third quarter of 2007.
The West Palm Beach metropolitan area saw the average home price inch up to $164,400 in the third quarter from $163,600 in the previous quarter. In the third quarter of 2007, the average home price was $262,000.
Nationwide, in year-over-year terms, house prices increased during the third quarter by 0.9 percent, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the first since the second quarter of 2007, when the national housing market began its slide. From its peak in 2007, the U.S. housing market is now down 10.7 percent, on average, the IHS noted.
For the first time since the IHS study began in 2005, no metropolitan areas were extremely overvalued. There were 52 in 2005.
Homes in Miami-Dade County were deemed fairly valued, while those in Broward and Palm Beach counties were considered undervalued.
For the nation as a whole, the housing market is now slightly undervalued – 8.6 percent when weighted by market value and 10.1 percent when weighted by housing units, according to IHS.
“While the rate of decline has decreased throughout the year as the market began to stabilize,” said James Diffley, group managing director of IHS Global Insight’s Regional Services Group, in a news release. “It’s not at all clear that the market is on a recovery path.”
WILLIS A. SMITH AWARDED BOOKER HIGH SCHOOL CONTRACT
Dec 21st
The School Board of Sarasota County has selected a construction management team for the rebuild of Booker High School. Willis A. Smith Construction, Inc. will be performing the Preconstruction services as a prelude to the actual construction. The new components of the high school are currently being addressed in the design phase by the architecture team consisting of: Harvard Jolly, Fawley Bryant and Jack Meredith (Creative Aesthetics). The preliminary total budget for the project is $45 million. The preconstruction phase will take approximately 10 to 11 months.
Commercial Value Drops Beginning to Slow
Dec 16th
The value of commercial real estate is still falling, but across the country, the pace has slowed compared to earlier in the year, according to Integra Realty Resources.
The New York-based company has completed more than 25,000 commercial valuation assignments in 2009, and its fourth quarter index shows that the office, industrial, and multifamily sectors lost only 3 percent of their value in the past three months. The lodging and retail sectors recorded a 5 percent drop.
Integra says that while not ideal, these rates of decline show a leveling off that sets the stage for a slow recovery.
“Commercial real estate is stabilizing quicker than some pundits believe,” said Jeffrey Rogers, president and COO of Integra Realty Resources. “Deterioration in values over the past three months has been markedly less then the past 12 months. The rate of decline is expected to slow even further and some sectors are expected to stabilize in the next six months.”
Rogers says he expects the value of commercial real estate to continue to decline an estimated 5 percent nationally through the first half of next year, but that rate is well below the 11-17 percent depreciation experience across asset classes in 2009.
The Integra survey shows that while conditions are improving, commercial real estate continues to be recessionary. A large percentage of Integra’s assignments are classified as distressed assets, with the Western (67 percent of assignments) and Southern (62 percent of assignments) regions struggling the most. The Eastern
and Central regions are faring a bit better, with 35 percent and 47 percent of assignments considered distressed assets.
“The office sector is showing the strongest glimmers of hope, and our research also shows the multifamily sector is moving toward stabilization,” Rogers said. “Lodging and retail will suffer worse in the coming months.”
Integra’s findings also illuminated the best and worst performing sectors in the country in regards to value change in the past 12 months. Nationally, the regions with the lowest rates of devaluation in the past 12 months include: Central multifamily (-7 percent), Central industrial (-9 percent), Southern industrial (-10 percent), Southern multifamily (-11 percent), and Central office (-11 percent).
According to Integra, the regions with the highest rates of devaluation include: Eastern lodging (-20 percent), Western lodging (-19 percent), Western retail (-19 percent), Western office (-18 percent), and Eastern office (-17 percent).
Despite the end-of-year slow down in depreciation, Mark Dotzour, chief economist at the Texas A&M Real Estate Center says recovery for the commercial real estate sector is a good 12 to 24 months away.
The Fort Worth Business Press reported that during a recent presentation at a local meeting of the Society of Commercial Realtors, Dotzour said a lack of valuation comparables is part of the reason investors aren’t scooping of low-priced deals.
Not surprisingly, Federal Reserve data shows that there has been no increase in the number of new commercial real estate loans in 2009, compared to 2008.
According to Dotzour, many large institutional banks aren’t eager to make loans because loans require comparable market analysis, or comps, and that could mean banks would have to recognize losses in their real estate portfolios, the paper said.
Dotzour contends that the buying flood gates will unleash as soon as there are enough commercial real estate transactions to produce market value comps that reflect today’s rock-bottom prices.
FROM DSNEWS.COM
Florida PSC approves Manatee biomass project
Dec 15th
MANATEE — The Florida Public Service Commission OK’d Tuesday a renewable energy contract for a $185 million biomass project to be built in Manatee, officials said.
The project, to be built by Florida Biomass Energy, will help diversify the way Progress Energy generates power and will insulate its customers from fluctuations in fossil fuel costs, according to the PSC.
The Bradenton company will burn waste wood and specially grown vegetation to generate up to 60 megawatts of electricity, the PSC said. Construction is slated to begin in the second quarter of next year and will produce at least 150 construction jobs and 25 full-time jobs at a complex set on 35 acres near Port Manatee, officials said.
Medical research firm debuts in Lakewood Ranch
Dec 15th
By JENNIFER RICH / http://www.bradenton.com/business/story/1915027.html
jrich@bradenton.com
LAKEWOOD RANCH — Another player in the medical research industry has moved to Manatee County.
Trod Medical US LLC, with headquarters in Paris, France, has opened an office/warehouse facility on Lakewood Ranch Boulevard at State Road 64 East.
The company is now manufacturing a Food and Drug Administration-approved surgical device in Europe used to treat soft tissues involving the prostate, liver and kidney. It uses radio frequency technology to heat diseased tissue and halt its growth.
The device, which will be marketed to hospitals, outpatient centers and private clinics for use on prostate cancer patients, is expected to be launched in July, said Manfred Sablowski, vice president and chief operating officer, and at least five to seven people will be hired at that time for the Manatee facility.
Sablowski said the company applied for FDA approval at the beginning of 2008 for its patented Encage device and received approval in October, a key factor allowing the company to enter the U.S. market and open a U.S. facility.
A third-party reviewer in Germany was used for the pre-approval of the device before submitting the FDA application.
“There was a lot of bureaucracy,” said Sablowski. “You better make sure the information in your 800-page document is correct; if there is one wrong word, you are in trouble.”
The United States is the largest market for the device because of its population, he said.
In February or March, the first patients in the U.S. will receive the new treatment, Sablowski said. The company is in negotiations with Moffitt Cancer Centers to use the center for training on the product and procedures for the treatment.
Treatments now being used for prostate cancer all have negative consequences, Sablowski said.
“Our focus was to eliminate those negative side effects,” he said.
Dr. Andre Faure, chief executive officer for Trod Medical and founder of the company, is the inventor of Encage. He developed the device and procedure in 2005 and decided he wanted to introduce it to the U.S. market. He recruited Sablowski and Brook Peterson, who both have extensive experience in the medical technology field that includes working with Pfizer. They also had their own consulting firms.
Trod Medical is a great addition to the group of medical research facilities already in Manatee County, said Eric Basinger, executive director of the Economic Development Council.
“Manatee County is cultivating a cluster of medical equipment designers and manufacturers, and Trod’s entry from its European base is an exciting chapter in that story,” he said. “Trod’s arrival is further evidence of Manatee County’s appeal to European businesses wanting to expand into the U.S. market.”
