Reuters (February 28)
China’s housing market seems to be approaching a paradigm shift. “The broad idea is to create a two-tier system. Local governments will rent out or sell flats below market prices to most residents, including some 300 million Chinese migrant workers who live far away from their hometowns in the mainland. Upgraders and investors could settle for a smaller private residential market, where regulators meddle less.”
Tags: China, Flats, Housing market, Investors, Local governments, Market prices, Migrant workers, Paradigm shift, Regulators, Rent, Residential, Residents, Sell, Two-tier system
Boston Globe (June 19)
“Many firms are implementing hybrid plans that call for two or three days a week in-office, though few enforce them. And fully remote situations remain common.” Things will never return to fully in-office, but offices are likely to grow more enticing. Companies that signed big leases, “with years of big rent checks ahead of them,” are left trying to rethink “the role — and look — of the office in a post-COVID world.” They are “trying to design an office worth coming back to.”
Tags: Companies, Design, Enforce, Enticing, Hybrid, In-office, Leases, Office, Post-Covid, Remote, Rent
Seeing Alpha (November 10)
“CPI came in red-hot again, up 0.9% month-over-month and 6.2% year-over-year, showing broad-based increases. The biggest contributors to price gains were energy, rent, food, and used cars and trucks.” As a result, “real average hourly earnings for American workers are down 1.2% year-over-year. Not exactly what we’re hoping to see.”
Mercury News (February 17)
“Despite an unprecedented 2.4 million jobs lost in the spring, Californians joined fellow Americans in paying down interest-heavy debt such as credit card bills while acquiring wealth-building loans by taking out mortgages…. But looks can be deceiving.” Aggregate figures can obscure real suffering. “Millions of Californians suffering job losses have accumulated crippling debt that goes uncounted in national measures: unpaid rent, utility bills, borrowed money from loved ones and, in some cases, predatory loans.”
Tags: California, Credit card, Debt, Interest, Jobs, Loans, Mortgages, Predatory, Rent, Suffering, U.S., Uncounted, Unprecedented, Utility bills, Wealth-building
Institutional Investor (August 6)
“For the world of institutional investing, the topic of our time is none other than fees.” Most of the solutions being touted, such as 1-or-30, are anything but revolutionary. “Any magic is really just sleight-of-hand meant to distract us from realizing how low our expectations are for any meaningful improvement in the existing misaligned fee structures.” We must overcome this built-in bias and “expand the window of possible choices to include those that will be seen as utterly unthinkable by today’s standards.” For example, a “rent” system could be adopted in which “the allocator no longer pays fees to the manager for the use of its own capital and is assured of receiving the investment outcome it seeks (i.e., the negotiated rent). The manager gets the capital and potential revenue it needs to run its business.” Such a revolutionary move would place the risk directly where it belongs: on the asset manager.
Tags: 1-or-30, Allocator, Asset manager, Capital, Expectations, Fee structures, Investing, Outcome, Rent, Revenue, Revolutionary, Risk
Bloomberg (January 12, 2012)
In Tokyo, “rents are now at the lowest since Miki Shoji started compiling data in 1990.”
Office rent fell 3.7% in 2011 from 2010. Simultaneously, the Capital’s vacancy rate climbed to 9.01% from 8.91%. With new office space set to increase by 12% in 2012, the vacancy rate is expected to remain high, with continued flexibility on rents.
Tags: Miki Shoji, Office, Rent, Tokyo, Vacancy
