The Dirt Lawyer's Blog Archive

So, the big news exciting everyone in the commercial real estate world yesterday was the announcement of CoStar acquiring its rival and sometime litigation adversary LoopNet in a combined stock and cash deal expected to close by the end of 2011.  As always, Retail Traffic has excellent coverage of the deal.  The two companies are, as far as I know, the biggest national players in the commercial real estate information market.  Since I am a lawyer I do not use either service much, other than for news; but on the property information side I do have a preference for one company over the other. When I saw this announcement, the one question I had was whether the combined company, given the market share it would have, would run afoul of anti-trust laws.  I am not the only one who thought that, as I saw a tweet or two to that effect and received a message from a friend (who can identify him/herself is s/he wants in the comment section) asking the same thing. My initial reaction was that

How do you get these three things into one blog post? Read on. A somewhat  encouraging article this morning on increased liquidity and demand for commercial real estate lending makes me happy.  As loans and properties reposition themselves one way or another, lenders have more ability to move money around as the balance improves. So more people -- alas, usually not the original owner in many cases -- make money.  The banks can lend again, the buyers of notes can reposition themselves as owners or restructured lenders...you get the picture. And we lawyers negotiate all that stuff, for better or worse. So why NATO? Because it is going away.  I am not , however, talking about the military.  I am talking about the NATO my father always referred to when I was a kid.  For him, NATO stood for " No Action, Talk Only ."  And face it: that's all many of us in the business have been able to do for the last few years, too.  But now we seem to be moving into a mode where we can do mo

THIS is what I want to read.  And my retail developer clients want to read it even more.  Thank you Crains and thank you CBRE for the optimistic report. The even better news?  Net asking rents are up about 3% from the previous quarter. So even though some retailers want to curb store size (Kohl's being the latest big box to join the trend, according to this WSJ piece today ), they will want the store fronts . Let's see if it holds.

Jones Lang LaSalle has a capital markets research report out that says commercial real estate volumes surged to just under $90 billion in the first quarter of 2011.  I guess that is good news. But the surges were mostly in Asia, with Japan being the biggest player there.  (This was before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, by the way.)  Europe?  Activity slowed compared to Q4 of 2010. Year end deals?  Ditto the Americas: a "modest drop-off."  JLL takes pains to say that the worldwide volume is still up from Q1 2010, but then there was nowhere to go but up, right? One thing I didn't notice was whether the volume, reported in dollars, made any difference because of the dollar's decline against most all other currencies. That, of course, is an entirely different subject that I will let the currency experts and economists figure out.   The report also notes: "There are sound reasons for investors to be looking at commercial property: its perceived inflati

Just one quick note: today's Wall Street Journal had a good piece on the big boys selling portions of their mall portfolios. Take a look here . And have a great Wednesday!

In my legal career I have lived by certain standards. One of them is to not just avoid improprieties, as all lawyers should, but to also avoid situations that even create an appearance of impropriety. (I know at least one person who disagrees that I do so, but s/he is, in a word, wrong.) Case in point: I serve on my local library board and am a director of my homeowners association. I also have the privilege of having been appointed to the county's regional planning commission, which studies and makes recommendations about macro land use issues in the area. Because of that appointment I have regular contact with elected officials and with county staff that might have an impact on matters involving my subdivision, which is in unincorporated territory. Although I didn't have to, out of an abundance of caution I have recused myself from any dealings with the county that involve my subdivision lest I be accused of trying to influence people improperly. I have refused to take o