Category Archives: Overseas Property

JLL jointly starts online property auction service

Posted on 17 Sep 2009 | Comments Off on JLL jointly starts online property auction service

(NEW YORK) Jones Lang LaSalle Inc, the second biggest publicly traded commercial property broker, is joining Real Estate Disposition Corp to start an online auction service to sell commercial property and loans.

‘In a stagnant sales market where interested investors are limited, using an auction opens up a property to a viable buyer marketplace,’ Jay Koster, president of Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle’s capital markets practice, said yesterday in a statement.

Real Estate Disposition runs http://www.auction.com, a website focusing on residential property sales. The site has sold more than US$5 billion in assets since 2007, Jeffrey Frieden, chief executive of the Irvine, California-based company, said in the statement.

It will now also sell commercial property and related debt as well as bank- owned real estate, Guy Ponticiello, managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle, said in an interview.

Commercial property sales in the US will fall to the lowest level in 18 years as the industry endures its worst slump since the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s, according to data from Real Capital Analytics Inc.

US commercial property values have plunged 36 per cent since peaking in 2007, as mortgage losses forced banks to restrict lending. Would-be buyers await defaults by investors who relied on debt to make purchase between 2005 and 2007, when prices were soaring. Continue reading →

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Protests over Harvard’s empty buildings

Posted on 17 Sep 2009 | Comments Off on Protests over Harvard’s empty buildings

Community activists say that abandoned projects blighted their neighbourhood

(BOSTON) Harvard University has provoked protest and confrontation in a nearby Boston neighbourhood where the school is backing away from plans to build housing and laboratories on land that it took years to buy.

Locked up: A padlocked fence surrounding a vacant, unfinished building owned by Harvard University in the Allston neighbourhood of Boston

Community activists in Allston, a section of Boston across the Charles River from Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, say that university delays have left a ‘blighted’ neighbourhood of vacant businesses, stalled construction sites and invading rats.

Harvard president Drew Faust said in an announcement in February that construction of a US$1 billion science centre in Allston would be slowed because of a ‘bleak’ economic outlook.

Harry Mattison, a member of the Allston Brighton North Neighbors Forum, said that his group will fight a real estate swap that would give Harvard land next to its campus in Allston unless the university develops more of its unused property.

‘They’ve been showing us all these renderings for more than a decade of how wonderful this neighbourhood is going to be,’ Mr Mattison said. ‘Now, they’re shifting their focus elsewhere, and the blue- collar residents of Allston are left holding the bag, living with the mistake Harvard made by purchasing all this land.’

If Harvard’s neighbours are not satisfied with the plan for the new housing complex, they can oppose re-zoning needed for the project, possibly through the courts, said Jessica Shumaker, a spokeswoman for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which oversees city planning.

Sweeping vision

Four years ago, former Harvard president Lawrence Summers announced a sweeping vision of Allston, home to about 20,000 people, as ‘a completely integral extension of the university’. In June, 2008, the school released pictures of the science centre, surrounded by trees. Continue reading →

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