Dennis Erickson

I've listed 12,200 square feet of warehouse/retail space near Bozeman Montana, asking price is $1,120,000.00 USD. The owner will lease back the entire property for two years at a cap rate of 7.3% making this a low-risk and attractive offering for a 1031 exchanger or cash laden investor.

Hint: ask your clients where they've "Parked" their investment dollars during these tumultuous times. Often they'll say, "My bank and I'm getting a lousy 2% interest."

This property is comprised of seven commecial condominium units, brand new, equipped with radiant overhead heat, ADA compliant bathrooms, 18-foot sidewalls, 14-foot overhead doors, super insualtion package of R-38 in sidewalls and R-50 in the ceiling. High quality.

The seller is creative and motivated. He wants to remain in one unit for a minimum of three years and will act as a manager if needed. For the asking price of $1,120,000 he will deposit, at closing, $170,000.00 in an escrow account and each month the escrow agent will send your client a check for $7,083.00 every month for 24 months following closing. It's a genuine no-brainer.

I offer Active Rain participants a 30% referral fee or 3% cooperating agent commission for fully representing your client in the transaction.

Let's make it rain!

I'm thinking of getting a baseball bat for my office.

The new proposed $15,000 tax credit for home buyers is working already! I met with a client today who came in to start looking at houses PROMPTED PRIMARILY BY THE PROPOSED $15,000 TAX CREDIT BEING CONSIDERED AS PART OF THE LATEST BAIL-OUT PACKAGE! Cool, right?

Maybe a plastic bat. Red. I like red.

I was excited to meet him. He was intelligent and quickly came to the point. He said he wanted to take advantage of the tax credit by buying a house and then moving out, renting the place and buying another house and so on. I calmly explained that I didn't think that was the intent of the legislation, and that the way the credit was proposed that probably wouldn't work. "Who's gonna know?" he asked. "I will. You will. And eventually, since you need to FILE TAXES TO GET A TAX CREDIT, the IRS will," I replied, with a sort of smile.

A red foam bat. Big one. Scary looking, but nothing they could send you to prison for if you had to use it.

He didn't like the answer, but hey, by this time I didn't like him much. We're in a real crisis and this cowboy wants to try and screw somebody. I tried to be polite. I tried to understand. I even made an attempt to convince myself the guy was just trying to be creative and that he'd come to his senses eventually and maybe even buy a house from me. But the experience just left me sort of empty. Vacant. Feeling a little soulless. I thanked him for coming in, nice to meet you, blah blah blah, but I think Mr. Buyer you need to rethink this strategy. It's a bad one. He didn't like that, either.

On second thought, maybe wood. Yeah, wood.

Okay, now, finally, amid the frustration, incomprehension of our governments inaction, disbelief in the absolute unwillingness of banks to help homeowners in distress there emerges a hero, Marcy Kapture, a Democractic representative from Toledo, Ohio. I just watched a CNN interview where Ms. Kapture told her constituents who were facing foreclosure because lenders were unwilling to answer phone calls or even make a lame attempt to negotiate short sale terms or re-cast burdensome adjustable rate mortgages to simply STAY PUT IN THEIR HOMES! Representative Kapture tells homeowners to get competent legal counsel and to push the foreclosing lender to produce the original note created when the home was purchased. Her underlying belief is that in many cases, that can't be done since mortgages were chopped up in pieces and sold in parcels to hundreds of investors. Her courage in putting forth this challenge to the fat cats in banking is encouraging and inspiring. At last someone who WILL STAND UP AND CHALLENGE THE POWERS THAT BE ON BEHALF OF HOMEOWNERS! WOW! I wish my representatives, Max (the sellout KIng) Baucus, John Tester and Denny Rehberg would have stood up for Montanans like this. I think this is BIG. And they said the American people were too soft for revolution.

YOU GO GIRL!

We've all heard the rumblings about the potential demise of the commercial real estate market. The old saying in the commercial business is that "commercial follows rooftops" which basically means that residential development is followed by a surge in commercial development. Retail stores, businesses open to serve the new residential growth. Does it mean that with a downturn in residential sales and prices that commercial real estate will also fail on a similar level as residential? I don't think so, but what I think matters very little in comparison to what the news media thinks of the situation.

I have huge respect for those journalists who devote themselves to getting the story RIGHT versus just getting the story. The problem is, that in a world where print media competes with television news and where immediacy is king and accuracy and completeness are secondary, we are often given an incomplete and inaccurate picture of the way things are. I believe this happened in my area with the reportage of the subprime mortgage situation. Our market was compared to the meltdown markets of Phoenix, Sacramento, Las Vegas and Florida when, in fact, local lenders were not experiencing foreclosure rates anywhere near those markets. Our local paper just took national wire service stories, pasted them on to the front page of the paper, wrote an alarming headline, and VOILA, there was a crisis where none had existed.

Commercial practitioners have an opportunity (and possibly an obligation to our clients) to help local media outlets keep the story accurate. By assembling and distributing local commercial real estate metrics such as vacancy rates, prevailing capitalization rates, absorption rates and anecdotal information driving the market, we can get ahead of the information curve and beat the media to the story simply by understanding the story better than they possibly can. We then need to share that information with the media. Caution: There is no room here for puffery or speculation, as Joe Friday would say: "Just the facts, ma'am." While this action won't stop any commecial market correction, it will at least provide some documentation to the adjustment and would remove the "Fear Factor" from any correction we might see.

Just a thought.

Keep 'er steady.