I have noticed among some people that I talk to that there seems to be an odd distinction made between pricing for distressed and non-distressed properties.  Or maybe the better way to put it is that there is a belief that is held by some that non-distressed properties are more valuable than distressed properties.  I’ve [...]

My post last week pointed out the reality that government, in creating public policy, picks winners and losers.  This piece from the Wall Street Journal covers an eminent domain issue in New York City.
The anti-Kelo wave is cresting in New York this week as plans for a new basketball arena clash with the property rights [...]

The subtitle of this blog contains a mention of incremental innovation.  For anybody interested, I explain the concept of incremental innovation in the “Who Am I?” page.  It occurred to me this morning that incremental innovation is an evolutionary process.  It is not revolutionary, in that incremental innovation does not occur with huge changes in [...]

Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free?  Real estate is full of people who would like to get something for free if they can.  That’s sort of the nature of the beast.  In addition, brokerage requires that you do a lot of work for free.  If I work on 10 [...]

I think one of the lessons of the down market is that no matter how much we plan for the worst, we’ll still be surprised by the impact of the unforeseen.  The title of this post, “Everything is Fine, as Long as Everything is Fine” comes from a conversation I had yesterday about a contract, [...]

I wrote from Portland that real estate is intensely cultural.  This column in Forbes follows nicely on that thought.  On California’s High Desert region, which is northeast of Los Angeles and Riverside Counties.
Today, it’s the stage for a different kind of battle, one that involves a struggle over preserving the American dream. For years, the [...]

I’m in Portland for the week doing a mix of business and personal stuff.  I like Portland a lot and it’s a great change of pace from Southern California.  Every time that I’m here it strikes me that real estate is intensely cultural.  The way that we use land and real estate comes from what [...]

Sarah Yaussi is the Executive Editor of Big Builder Magazine, a trade magazine for the homebuilding industry.  You can find her on Twitter where she is @BigBuilder, has 2,024 followers and ranked #3 on my list of influential real estate Twitter users.   You can also find her on the web where she runs a blog [...]

The response to my list of top 100 influential real estate Twitter users was positive enough to tell me that there is a real void out there in terms of being able to discover new industry related people to follow.  In response to that void, and to also provide for some kind of a clearinghouse [...]

Has anybody else noticed that real estate reporting is affected by an inherent and assumed bias in favor of sellers?  Think about it for a second.  Every article, newscast, etc., frames the story in terms of the market getting better, or worse with the assumption that readers and listeners will infer that it means better [...]