Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders has been making its way around the blogosphere for the past couple of days.  In addition to the usual great folksy one liners (like “Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut”), Buffett also provides some thoughts on the housing market.
"Within a year or so, residential housing problems should [...]

I’m not sure why, but I had a funny thought this afternoon and got to thinking what life would be like if the Costar management also ran Google.  Some possibilities:

Google searches would cost $1,000 each.  That might seem like a big price tag, but just think about all of the value you’re going to derive [...]

This is important for the Arizona solar industry (which I sort of follow as a hobby).  From the Arizona Republic.
Chandler officials expressed relief at the quick death of the "anti-solar" bill in the state Legislature.
H.B. 2701 was withdrawn Thursday by its sponsor, Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, after the bill drew a storm of protests.
"It would [...]

In Part 1 of this series of posts, I outlined my general problem with overreliance on models and data to drive decisions in the market.  It’s not that I think models are useless, it’s that I think they have limited use which the model creators rarely recognize. 
I think the poster child example of overconfidence [...]

The primary lesson that the downturn has taught me is that psychology plays a bigger part in the market than any other single force.  Models and spreadsheets do not always provide meaningful insight into the market because data and analysis are derived from imperfect sources.  Nobody loves data and graphs more than me, but this [...]

As a response to my post on new CRE tools, CRE Console posted the following in the comments.  Maybe some of the readers would like to Beta test.
John, thanks for the mention. We’re loyal readers of your blog. When we were still in the creation phase, two of your posts we took to heart the [...]

One of the difficult things to do if you have your hands full trying to put deals together (and maybe you also write a silly blog) is to stay up to date on changes in services and technology.  I often write critical posts about services that I find to be klunky, or stuck in the [...]

One of the conundrums that comes up on a daily basis in real estate is the “logical buyer” conundrum.  There are a bunch of different variations of “logical buyer”, but the SPG/GGP deal seems to be one.  Anytime you have anything for sale in real estate, there is always a buyer that makes more sense [...]

Related to my previous post and the Costar article, here is a graph that shows the percent of non-performing loans for both CRE and construction loans.  I made a full post out of this information which you can read here.
Note that construction loans were non-performing at 4X the rate of CRE loans at the time [...]

This item from Costar seems not right to me.  Go read the full item and see if it makes sense to you.  Here is an excerpt and my thoughts are below:
In reviewing the 16 material loss reports completed this year on banks that all closed last spring and summer, it becomes clear just how much [...]