Stock Market News & Stocks to Watch from StraightStocks » Real Estate

I Wonder What the Fire Insurance Costs on This Real Estate

Fred Fuld — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:08:00 +0000

In the past, we've written about houses shaped like a href="http://stockerblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/weird-homes.html" target="_blank"guitars, airplanes, and shoes/a. Since Halloween is approaching, we thought it would be interesting to point out the a href="http://www.wvpics.com/Pumpkin%20House.htm" target="_blank"Pumpkin House/a in West Virginia, decorated with thousands of pumpkins filled with candles. The place has become a tourist attraction.div class="blogger-post-footer"div class='adsense' style='text-align:center; padding: 0px 3px 0.5em 3px;' script type="text/javascript"!-- google_ad_client="ca-pub-2427831169011625"; google_ad_width=300; google_ad_height=250; google_ad_format="300x250_as"; google_ad_type="text"; google_ad_channel ="8681602088"; google_color_border="FFF3DB"; google_color_bg="FFF3DB"; google_color_link="1B0431"; google_color_url="1B0431"; google_color_text="29303B"; //--/script script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" /script img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/23020893-4649535279450585855?l=stockerblog.blogspot.com'//div

The Two Mega Trends in Real Estate

Graham Summers — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:37:06 +0000

Oct 1st, 2008: Rentals will rule real estate for the next three years

Finding Great Chinese Real Estate Investments!

Tony Sagami — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:30:00 +0000

In 12 days, I will be stepping off a Hainan Airlines flight at the new Beijing International Airport and setting out to investigate some investment ideas. I'm particularly excited about two real ...

Beazer Homes USA Inc. (BZH)

Steve Patterson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:29:00 +0000

I was watching the housing stocks back in August and September of 2007 when they were falling to new lows everyday but switched out of the industry in favor of banks, autos and financials. But after seeing an old name reaching a new low after-hours, I started to re-examine the old names.

Vulture real estate investors swoop in

Stockmasters Staff — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:37:56 +0000

Good article on CNN Money today about the Real Estate market, check it out:

Let the bargain hunting begin. Prices may still be falling, but they're low enough for some investors to buy, sell, and pocket a tidy profit.

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? A comment on General Electric’s corporate lending business

John Hempton — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:29:00 +0000

Avid readers will know that I rather like General Electric at these prices. Here I point out just how good the weak USD is to them. And here I point out just how fantastic GE’s asset sales have been. [Just imagine if GE still owned FGIC an...

Real Estate Price ETFs

Roger Nusbaum — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:26:00 +0000

Macro Shares filed for two ETFs that allow for gaming real estate prices as measured by the S&P Case-Shiller Composite 10 Home Price Index.

The 10 in the name refers to the ten cities in the index which are Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.

One fund will go double long the index with ticker UMM and the other will go double short the index with ticker DMM.

You can read more about these from IndexUniverse and 24/7 Wallstreet.

We all know that real estate prices have been going down. One report a couple of weeks ago, via Bloomberg, had the Case-Shiller 20 Index (so a bigger sampling) declining by 14.4% versus the previous year.

For now there seems to be no consensus of how long before the house decline bottoms and turns around. Speculation on when the turn occurs could make both ETF very popular when they list, assuming the funds do list quickly.

Both oil macro shares garnered a lot of attention for the unintended consequence of trading very far their respective NAVs. One explanation I heard for this a long time ago, but it may not be correct, was that the oil macros had to price in the reality of contango and backwardation that exists in the oil market. I do not know if the new home price macros will have some other unintended consequence like maybe stemming from how Case-Shiller indexes don't price cash indexes only futures markets. At least I could not find cash indexes on Yahoo Finance, BigCharts or StockCharts.com.

Assuming no unintended consequence and once the market does bottom it is possible that this becomes a one-way trade for a long time. The history of housing cycles seem to have far fewer downturns than with equities. Keep in mind this is just an initial reaction/hunch that could be several years away from even having a shot of being correct.

Forgetting the specifics of the of these products, UMM and DMM stand to be the first of what I believe will be many more products that offer access to equity-like returns that don't really involve exposure to capital markets--things like GDP, carbon credits and some of the other ideas that have come up before in this site like maybe timberland in New Zealand and so on.

I am convinced that the alternative asset space is going to grow, asset allocations will as a matter of routine include alternative assets along with stocks, bonds and so on and products like these will be part of the mix.

It is still very early (UMM and DMM haven't even listed yet after all) and we all have more to learn but it will happen.

World ex US Real Estate ETFs

Richard Shaw — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:35:30 +0000

The four big asset classes are stocks, bonds, cash and real estate. Direct ownership of real estate is the pure form of the asset class. To achieve diversification within the financial capability of most investors, securitization of a direct real estate portfolio (REITs) is a second best solution. REIT vs REAL ESTATE FUNDS: The problem with publicly [...]

A Bittersweet Tale of Two Worlds

Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:02:10 +0000

When Americans first celebrated Memorial Day, our nation was split in two — North and South. Similarly, our planet today is divided in two separate worlds — East and West. They’re not at war. But in the never-ending battle for economic wealth and hegemony, the chasm between them couldn’t be deeper: [...]

REITs Outperform Stocks & Direct Real Estate

Richard Shaw — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:24:46 +0000

It is ironic that US REITs year-to-date have outperformed US stocks, non-US developed market stocks, and emerging market stocks, as well as directly owned commercial and residential real estate. Only commodities have outperformed REITs so far this year. VNQ, ICF, IYR and RWR are still down from 17% to 20% on a trailing 12-month basis, [...]

Investors Seeking Foreclosure Riches

Jeffrey Miller — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:24:43 +0000

One of the ingredients for "bubbles" is the quest for the home run. Investors look to how much they wish to gain rather than to risk and reward. What happens when this quest intersects with a major downturn in an...

Historical Private and Public Real Estate Prices

Richard Shaw — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:12:31 +0000

House prices are in trouble in many, but not all locations. Nationally, house prices are down. The S&P/Case-Shiller house price index gets the headlines, but a related and less noticed index measures price changes for commercial real estate, which is still in pretty good shape — at least for now. Houses exist in [...]

A Word About Mortgage Resets: Tsunami

Jim Kingsland — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:36:44 +0000

The image below shows what Jim would call “max-pain” in the on going storm of mortgage resets. We are now in the midst of a mind numbing peak in resets of subprime mortgages. Gee, could this be why retail sales and consumer confidence have fallen off cliff? And while we’re at this [...]

REIT-Treasury Yield Spreads (1971 to-date)

Richard Shaw — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:03:16 +0000

We advised investors generally to avoid US equity REITs in January 2007. At that time, we felt they had gone too far, too fast and were bound to suffer a reversion to the mean, by not performing or by declining. They went down a lot. In August 2007, we reiterated our concerns that REITs were overvalued [...]

Housing Price Stabilization Nowhere In Sight

Chad Brand — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:25:40 +0000

March 2008 existing home inventory data was released this week and for about nine months now we have seen inventories hover around a ten month supply, as shown by my updated chart below. Without declining inventories (prompted by sellers reducing their prices to more reasonable levels) we will not see stabilization in housing prices or improved [...]