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“An Army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of bullshit.”–General George S. Patton, Jr. Sometimes you just have to wonder how these guys keep getting the top spot. Former Home Depot Chief Bob Nardelli was well known around the orange themed retailer as a guy with organizational prowess and discipline on his mind. What became known inside the company as the Orange Crush, (with apologies to Syracuse University) the military like precision (is that an oxymoron now?) that Nardelli attempted to instill in the troops, from cashiers to counter…

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”– John Kenneth Galbraith, (1908-2006) Noted historian, economist and commentator. Presidents rise and fall with their public’s perception of economic progress. With the advent of personal computers, spreadsheet software and a few hours of instruction, the motivated executive can now construct a financial model and forecast that will ultimately provide the answer they need, with little regard for pesky things, like rules of logic, facts and an economic history that simultaneously flies in the face of reality while making the author of the worksheet look like a genius.  …

Earth Day is now Earth Week. News about climate change and the green movement—and what everyone is doing to advocate against one and promote the other—is everywhere this week. Last weekend, for example, The Tower Cos. held a “Recycling Day Festival@The Blairs,”—a 1,400-unit community in Silver Spring, Md.—collecting donations of clothing, electronics and furniture with participating sponsors. And Archstone is hosting a “Green Leasing Expo,” a four-day event in the West Region designed to encourage residents and prospects to conserve natural resources—and at the same time is offering a “Go Green and Get Green” savings of up to $500 in…

In New York City the daffodils are in full bloom and you don’t have to go to Central Park to see them. You may not find any blooming flowers in Times Square, but in other parts of town urban landscaping is plentiful and quite effective. It provides excellent curb appeal—a concept that takes on a much more literal (and urgent) meaning in city environments where, frequently, only a small bit of sidewalk separates the entrance of an apartment building from the curb. With smaller green footprints to design and care for, urban locales generally mean easier—and less costly—landscaping choices. One…

It is a balmy Southern California evening as I sit on the porch to write this post. The seasons are clearly changing as we slip further into spring, which definitely feels like the beginning of summer. The harbingers of change continue to abound for the housing industry, signaling the stirrings of a return to better health. Shaken and awakened as we are by the tumult of the last year, especially the last six months, all eyes are on the future: when the recovery finally takes hold in earnest, what will it look like for the multifamily industry? One thing is…

You don’t need to own or manage multi-housing units to see how effectively today’s high-efficiency conservation fixtures work. Even in a single-family unit, the results of retrofitting with high-efficiency products can be impressive. But when you begin to do math for the multiple units, the results can be downright awe-inspiring. If you are prone to green thinking at all, you can’t help but wonder what it would be like if everyone everywhere decided to conserve water. The beauty of water conservation is that it is really, really easy. And it can be very inexpensive, too. High efficiency toilets (HETs), of…

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) was extended by the Obama Administration in February to provide government financing to private investors for the purchase of CMBS in addition to other types of asset-backed securities. At this point, signs that TALF would have a positive effect in reviving the conduits market may not be good.  According to Sam Chandan, president and chief economist of Real Estate Economics LLC, in his Monday report of April 13, the results of the second round of funding from the government “raise serious questions about the viability of the TALF program in its current form.”…

As concerned taxpayers around the nation take to the streets in “tea parties” to protest the federal government’s spending on financial rescue efforts, an eventual economic recovery still seems far away. But there are a few glimmers of hope on the horizon. Those aggrieved tea partiers can at least take some solace in the fact that the money they do have left after doling out to Uncle Sam will go a bit further these days. The Consumer Price Index fell in March by 0.1 percent and—more notably—registered its first annual decline since 1955, dropping 0.4 percent from March of 2008….

A couple weeks back I wrote about the travesty of the house next door, which had, under my unsuspecting nose, been transformed into an ultra-sophisticated hydroponic pot farming operation. This went on for nearly three years, with my wife and I suspecting nothing.   Not long after I posted that, I heard through the grapevine that the house had been sold. We waited, praying (admittedly, rather selfishly) that the new owners would be a good fit for us personally, and for the neighborhood. Yesterday, we got our first glimpse of the new reality. Shortly after the thirty cubic yard dumpster…

“Government has laid its hand on the health, housing, farming, commerce and education industries, and to an ever increasing degree interferes with the people’s right to know. Government tends to grow; government programs take on weight and momentum as public servants say, always with the best of intentions. But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or economically as the private sector of the economy.”   President Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the U.S. (1981 to 1989) The housing markets are a mess. The massive fraud, perpetrated while the regulators were sitting on…