Mortimer Zuckerman, Boston Properties chairman and New York media mogul, recently reaped $50 million after selling nearly 10 percent of his holdings in our hometown-based real estate giant.

So guess where he’s going to put his profits? Into a promising biotech firm? A hot social networking outfit?
Wrong, into printing presses for his feisty New York tabloid, the Daily News.

As a veteran of the newspaper business, all I can say is bravo, Mr. Zuckerman.

Naturally, though, the move to cash out in one increasingly troubled business – commercial real estate – and pump money into an industry with far more troubles, newspapers.

The Wall Street Journal points out Zuckerman has been fairly dour in his recent public statements about the health of the economy. That, in turn, points to more tough times for the already reeling commercial real estate industry, now struggling to fill tens of millions of square feet of empty office space.

So the decision to cash in some of his stock in BP makes sense in that context – things are likely to get worse in the nearterm, not better.

But investing that money into new printing presses for a proud but struggling Big Apple tabloid?

I like it, but I am not sure this is going to be a big money maker.

I got a kick out the Globe story on how the gambling debate is once again heating up on Beacon Hill.

It’s an issue I have covered pretty thoroughly in my weekly column for B&T, to put in a shameless plug.

The article was fine. What got my attention was the seemingly desperate attempt by owners of the struggling Bayside Expo Center in Dorchester to get their site onto the list of possible casino locations.

While public debate may just now be starting again, the issue of who is going to get to build these casinos should they be legalized is the ultimate insiders’ game.

And sorry Bayside, were headed into the 9^th inning on this one, and the opposing team has a 15-run lead.

The favorite to win the casino sweepstakes in the Boston area is Richard Fields, the gambling developer and horse racing enthusiast from the Big Apple became the lead investor in the Suffolk Downs racetrack a couple years ago.

Fields has spent his time quietly and successfully building support with Mayor Thomas M. Menino and the local community.

Case closed.

In Western Massachusetts, Mohegan Sun has also rolled out extensive plans for a casino in the town of Palmer.

That plan seems pretty far along as well.

Of course, every time gambling gets debated seriously on Beacon Hill, someone gets cute and comes up with a goofy location for a casino.

A few years ago a state senator made headlines proposing that the Hynes convention center in the Back Bay be converted into a gambling hall.

Fun idea, but it never had a chance of becoming reality.

Say hello to Stefan Frey, a principal at Commonwealth Commercial Advisors in Medfield and my guest blogger for today.

Stefan takes a look at a question that is dogging lots of folks, and not just in comnmercial real estate.

To be successful, are also supposed to become social media fanatics, constantly posting, blogging and Twittering the day through.

Wonderful. But who has the time? And, more importantly, does it work to bring in business?

Anyway, here are Stefan’s thoughts on the social media rat race.

Does Social Media work in commercial real estate? That’s a damn good question.

Here’s the answer, I don’t know… YET. Here’s what I do know… I know I can’t have a conversation with another business owner without them asking if I’m doing anything online with social media and if it’s working or not. My response is YES, I’m involved in social media… is it working? Not sure. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter and most recently Facebook… and to be honest I feel like a toddler in the baby pool who desperately wants to swim like the big kids… or at least I think I want to swim… or better yet, I’m told I need to swim.

There is no question social media is all the buzz these days and there are already 1000’s of guru’s out there who want to show you how to capitalize on this new era of social interaction and networking for business purposes. I recently bit the bullet and signed on to Facebook, despite my wife telling me I was going to scare young children if I joined. I know it’s not taboo to be on Myspace or Facebook anymore but I still can’t help feeling like I just signed up for the high school yearbook committee all over again. So far I’ve reconnected with a whole bunch of high school friends I haven’t spoken to in years, which is great… but I still don’t have a clue how to use it to grow my business. I have a little bit more of a clue with Twitter but really I’m just on there once or twice a day to try to post something relevant to my business or push my blog out there. I’m not the guy telling you I had grape nuts with sliced up bananas on it for breakfast. I feel the most confident on LinkedIn. I’m part of 30some groups and have networked with some great people. That said I know I still have a lot to learn.

In commercial real estate, or more specifically, commercial real estate brokerage in the Boston area, my goal is to network with other business owners and companies who have a future need to either lease or purchase commercial space as well as networking with commercial property owners and commercial investors. But like many business owners I’m always scrambling to find the time. Then, when I do find the time, where is my time spent going to be the most productive? Which social media outlet is going to give me the biggest ROT (Return On my Time)?

I’m told, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and “this is a marathon, not a sprint”, so don’t get me wrong, I’m totally on board (obviously or I wouldn’t be sitting here at 9:15pm writing this blog article!). I just hope the conductor points me to the right seat after a few too many cocktails in the bar car and sitting next to me is Warren Buffett who tells me he would like me to be his exclusive commercial broker for all of Berkshire Hathaway’s companies.

Could it be the only silver lining to the foreclosure epidemic is turning out to be a grand mirage for many would-be home buyers?
The boom years saw condo prices soar in lower-income Boston neighborhoods like Dorchester, with units routinely fetching more than $300,000 from buyers armed with easy-to-get subprime loans.
But many of those loans have since gone bust, creating a glut of more than 900 bank owned properties in Boston, almost all in Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan and East Boston.
The median condo price in Dorchester is now $110,000, and a meager $55,900, according to the Warren Group, the publisher of Banker & Tradesman.
Sales of condos for $50,000 in Dorchester, once unheard of, are now routine.
So this must be great news for first-time home buyers looking to crack the market, right?
Wrong. Most of these units are in triple-deckers with defunct condo associations.
Banks won’t lend to buyers interested in scooping up these units. As a result, most of these transactions are cash deals, Tim Deihl of At Home Realty tells me.
That’s great for small time investors and speculators, but bad news for aspiring home buyers, who might have $10,000 in the bank, but certainly not $50,000.
Of course, many of these “investors’’ will be reselling these units two or three years from now for $150,000.
Let’s just hope they at least do a little work on them first.

Forget the flashy stuff. If you want to make a little money in some tough times, invest in a warehouse, or better yet, a new apartment building.

That’s the recommendation of a new industry report that turns some traditional ideas about commercial real estate investing on their head.

Commercial real estate experts in a recent poll, asked where investors should put their cash, gave the highest ratings industrial properties and apartment complexes.

While apartments got a 5.1 percent investment rating and industrial properties a 4.3, offices came in far behind with at 3.5, followed by retail and hotels, at 3.4 each, according to the RERC/CCIM Investment Trends Quarterly.

It’s worth noting the ratings were on a scale of 1-10, so no one should be getting overly excited about a 5 here.

While apartments would appear risky, the report notes the residential sector seems to be finally stabilizing. The same, though, can’t be said of the commercial real estate market.

Still, cash rated higher as an investment option, getting a 5.6 percent rating.

Not a ringing endorsement of the commercial market, that’s for sure.

Newly minted House Speaker Robert DeLeo is set to take center stage in this fall’s debate on Beacon Hill on whether to legalize Las Vegas style slot machines, industry insiders say.

DeLeo has become the pointman on the issue, not in the least because of his own staunch support over the years for the idea of putting slots at the state’s ailing racetracks.

Two of the four – Wonderland and Suffolk Downs – just happened to be in DeLeo’s district.

“I think this proposal is going to be pretty comprehensive and sweeping,’’ said one State House insider familiar with the new House leader’s plans.

But the emergence of DeLeo as the leading player in the gambling debate comes as Gov. Deval Patrick quietly relinquishes his leadership role on the issue.

Patrick, as you may recall, launched a grand push two years ago to legalize a trio of resort casinos.

But he ended up getting handed an humiliating defeat by DeLeo’s anti-gambling predecessor, Sal DiMasi.

This time around, the governor is determined to let the House take the lead and then try and shape the legislation as it comes out.

One key difference is Patrick’s continued support for resort casinos, even as DeLeo clearly favors racetrack slots.

But in the end, this might be just the leadership shift needed to finally passed expanded gambling in Massachusetts.

DeLeo is in a much better position – and may have the better, horse-trading skills as well - to cut the kind of gritty deals needed to pass such a major piece of legislation.

Well, it should be interesting.

That’s what I am left thinking after reading about the Fed’s growing concern over the precarious state of the already battered commercial real estate sector.
There’s a stunning, $165 billion out there in loans on downtown towers across the country waiting to be refinanced, with few takers among our still shell shocked lenders.
The potential for another major collapse, this time in the commercial real estate sector, clearly weighed on Fed officials in their confab yesterday.
How much damage the commercial sector will do to the economy remains to be seen.
For a long time, I thought, like a lot of people, that all those mortgage-backed securities gone bad would remain a slightly worrisome but firmly Wall Street problem.
The near financial collapse of September 2008 woke me on that score.
At the least, more Hancock tower-style foreclosures will dump another load of bad loans on the recovering, but still weakened, banking industry.
One thing is clear, though: The same hyper-bubble mentality that got us into the housing mess clearly infected the sales of big downtown skyscrapers.
I remember back during the boom talking to one Hub real estate tycoon as he prepared to sell one of the city’s best known skyscrapers for an astronomical price.
While some in the industry were clearly stunned by the price, he explained his view of a seismic shift in the pricing paradigm that would justify such a valuation.
You can guess how all that turned out.

Here’s a sneak peak at the future of casino gambling here in Massachusetts.

On Beacon Hill, lawmakers are quietly hammering out the details of plans to legalize casino gambling, with a key State House hearing slated for next month.

One likely scenario is two large resort casinos, one in Palmer in Western Massachusetts, and one at the Suffolk Downs racetrack in East Boston. In addition, two smaller racinos would be legalized at the Plainridge harness track near the Rhode Island border and at the

That, anyway, is the scoop from State Rep. Brian Wallace (D-South Boston), who is helping lead the casino charge in the House.

Out of luck, at least for now, is the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, whose power to open a Foxwoods style casino in Middleborough was severely undercut by a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this year.

New Bedford lawmakers and developers are likely to push to include the city as a casino site as well.

If so, that would make three casinos and two racinos.

But while two casinos seem like a sure sell right now, Wallace is not sure a third will fly.

About that State House hearing on casino gambling, right now it’s being eyed for Sept. 16^th or 17^th.

Well I think so.

We’ve bent over to save the nation’s biggest banks, not out of love for any particular institution, but to head off a larger collapse.

But what about a development disaster in the heart of Boston, one that has destroyed the downtown shopping district and threatens to leave a big, ugly hole in the city’s center for years to come?

That, of course, is the Filene’s project, that sweeping plan of Hub tower builder John Hynes to renovate the historic department store and build a new condo, hotel and office tower next to it.

We all know what happened next. Hynes began demolishing part of the sprawling Filene’s complex to make way for the project, when economic disaster struck in September 2008.

The veteran Boston tower builder suddenly found himself without a construction lender in sight, unable to nail down the hundreds of millions in loans needed to keep the project moving.

He’s been struggling valiantly to get the Filene’s project back on track, but to no avail.

There’s now talk that it could take years – maybe even a decade – to get this key Hub project back under construction.

Here’s what Hynes had to say in a recent email from Korea, where he is overseeing the construction of New Songdo City, an entirely new, $35 billion metropolis.

“I have no idea when Filenes financing will come through.  We keep promoting, searching and talking about it to potential investors and lenders every day. The trends are not good–capital markets remain frozen, real estate loans are hard to find (especially construction loans) and the overall trends for real estate values continue to decline.  So it is an uphill battle, but one that we will eventually win.  The City, the market, our location and the project are too strong, long term to be ignored for too long.”

It’s time for folks, especially at City Hall, to stop the blame game and start figuring out how to turn this mess around. And how about some help from your economic development team, Governor Patrick?

After all, this is not about John Hynes, but a crippling recession that has made even the most brilliant business operators look like fools

Maybe he can do it all on his own. But given the still dire state of the economy and banks that are in run and hide mode, I have my doubts.

That was my reaction after reading through Jones Lang LaSalle’s report on the dismal showing by the Boston office market in the second quarter.

The second quarter saw one of the steepest rises in the office vacancy rate on record, according to a new report by Jones Lang LaSalle.

The region lost nearly 69,000 jobs for the 12 month period ending in May –more than half in sectors that generate demand for office space.

Downtown Boston saw more than 516,000 square feet of office space hit the market as financial services firms pared payrolls and put unneeded corporate suites on the market.

Rents, meanwhile, have plunged from the $70 a square foot range during the boom down to $50 a square foot by the end of the second quarter, the firm reports.

One glimmer of hope – the pace of jobs losses appears to be moderating.

That could be a sign that the corporate bloodletting that flooded the office market with empty space in the first half of the may start to taper off during the second half, the report suggests.

Sadly, that’s what stands for good news these days.