Boston Properties has in single-handed fashion kept the Greater Boston office market alive over the past few years.
But the Securities and Exchange Commission is now rattling its saber, with the first steps toward what may be much tighter scrutiny of real estate investment trusts like BXP.
The SEC has begun exploring whether to start regulating REITs [...]

It looks like the filthy oil rich Gulf States are finally shedding their crazy real estate ways.
Back during the bubble years, investors and governments in the tiny but impossibly rich Arab principalities poured their money into all sorts of wild projects.
I remember writing a couple years back about Boston architectural firms who, amid the onset [...]

My jab at the Tea Party - “A Tea Party Full Of Mad Hatters” - stirred up a hornet’s nest.

However, I’ll more than stand by the concerns I laid out in my weekly Banker & Tradesman column. The Tea Party dominated Congress is shaping up to be the most intellectually challenged group of public servants [...]

Remember the heat the Obama Administration took for its $160 billion bank bailout bill?
Well it turns out that was chicken feed compared to the $1.2 trillion in emergency loans the Federal Reserve doled out during the tumultuous fall of 2008, Bloomberg News reports after a months-long review of until now obscure government records.
Morgan Stanley alone [...]

If you can’t sell
your home, then fix it up instead.

Faced with a tough
real estate market, that’s the choice an increasing number of homeowners are
making, contends Texas-based BuildFax.
Remodeling activity
jumped 2 percent in the Northeast this June compared to June 2010, reports the
firm, which tracks building permits.
Overall, the BuildFax
Remodeling Index recorded its 20th straight month of year [...]

Our hometown real estate giant was nicked in the second quarter with a 2 percent decline in earnings.
Overall occupancy in its national portfolio of towers dropped to 91.9 percent, or a decline of 1.3 percent.
Still, one indicator went up – rents. Base rent grew 14 percent.
Not bad for a slow grow, maybe even no-grow economy. [...]

Sorry to go all doom and gloom on you here.
Still, it’s hard to get too excited about a recent slate of reports showing a rebound in the commercial office market.
With the stock market tanking, all now depends on whether the wobbly economy holds.
That said, in a bright sign amid the gloom, investment activity in the [...]

I am sure I am offending someone out there, but really, how can I be alone on this?
I can’t stand all those 1970s hotels built to look like castles. Frankly, I can’t stand the Tudor style, period, end of sentence. Anytime I see it on a house I picture myself as the owner trying to [...]

It’s great to have championship sports teams.
But at the end of the day, it’s even better to have championship hospitals and research centers.
Boston healthcare and research institutions pulled in more than $2.1 billion in federal research funding in 2010.
It marked the 16th straight year that Boston’s booming healthcare sector had led the nation in pulling [...]

The office market, whether you are talking about Boston or Boise, is all about jobs.
If companies are hiring and unemployment is going down, empty office space starts to disappear and rents rise. When bad times hit, the opposite happens.
Now it looks like the office market is starting to feel the impact of the slowdown in [...]