I thought they were called "human bed warmers" or "pillow fluffers" now?

This summer we stayed in a very nice condo while our bathrooms were redone. It looked like one floor had been converted to short term "corporate" rentals. What wasn't empty may have had actual humans who bought a unit living in them. We could have stayed long term for cheaper than what they were selling for. Yet, I don't think they were considered "apartments." They are not the only condo offering it either.
My guess is the definition of what the rental market consists of has become a lot fuzzier.

I got the renewal letter from my landlord this week. They are offering a new 12-month lease at exactly the same rental price as my current lease (which is about $450 per month under the published rate).

I wasn't impressed, but there is the advantage of not having to move all my stuff and change my address, driver's license, car insurance, etc. I guess that is worth something there. On the other hand, we have started to look at a few fixer-upper homes in extremely nice neighborhoods as those are now in our price range. Non-fixer-uppers are holding fairly well and are still way out of reach.

JPM used repo 105's.

---Bloomberg TV.

Yogi - JPM reported them properly. Is this bad? Guess we'll see.

Rents projections are de facto job loss, wage and salary decline, unemployment projections. I don't think anyone's actually in a position to say. Right?

1 currency now -yogi wrote:

JPM used repo 105's.

I'm shocked.

give me a few minutes... recovering from a night on the town in sin city.

'Repo 105' sounds like a deadly artillery piece. Some kind of anti-bank weapon.

".......appears to have hit bottom and is stabilizing."

Boy oh boy! How many times have I heard phrases like THIS in the past 2 1/2 - 3-years? If I had a dime for every time ..........

Good Morning - Time to milk some cows..........

Calm before the storm?

Overnight comments. Last year most nights saw 1000+ and I often skipped whole threads when I logged on in the morning. Lately there have been only a couple of hundred allowing me a chance to skim them.

Peak doom.

Got dragged kicking and screaming for a bachelor party, so no poker since I won't sit if I have more than one beer.

After a great hike to the waterfall at ice box in Red Rock Canyon, the night proceeded to a fine conclusion, which is all I'll say.

black dog,

I was thinking the same thing. Driving in on I-66 it had more than the usual amount of tractor-trailers. Has been that way for about a month.

Passed where they are clearing the site for a new Walgreens and PNC bank. The sign man was a 50ish year old white guy. Everyone I saw on the site was white and 40 plus. Three years ago they were probably running major jobs.

No jobs, no rents. Spiral to the bottom continues.

@nova

DC metro area = Rome.

black dog,

Yeah. Yet the woman who is running the deli downstairs was damn near pleading with me to buy more lunches from her.

black dog wrote:

Higher taxes -----> lower cash flow-------->falling property prices.

Higher interest rates, same result. Magic CREball says; "All Signs Point To YES"

Ruth Marcus - On health reform's price tag, score one for skepticism - washingtonpost.com
Just a snippet:

In analyzing the likely deficit reduction of the Senate health-care bill in the second 10 years, the CBO projected "a broad range between one-quarter percent and one-half percent of gross domestic product." This is wiggle room amounting to more than half a trillion dollars over the decade. As the CBO put it, "The imprecision of that calculation reflects the even greater degree of uncertainty that attends to it, compared with CBO's 10-year budget estimates."
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That's one reason to take the cost estimates with a grain of salt. Here's another: Of the $138 billion saved in the first 10 years, $70 billion represents premiums collected for a new long-term-care program, money the government will have to pay in benefits later. An additional $20 billion in savings comes from changes to the federal student loan program.

And here is the accompanying tablespoon of salt: The CBO is required to assume that Congress will do what it promises. So, for example, Congress promises in the measure to cut several hundred billion dollars in Medicare spending. Sometimes such promises have come to pass. Other times, as in the current difficulty with scheduled cuts in Medicare reimbursements for doctors, they are put off because of a public -- or politically connected -- outcry.

One big reason for the CBO's long-term assessment of major cost savings involves the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans. This is the tax that, in the face of opposition from labor unions and others, has been diluted to almost nothing -- a measly $32 billion, compared with $149 billion in the original Senate bill -- during the first 10 years. Will the tax really be collected in 2018 -- long after many of those voting for it will have left office, long after the benefits it is helping to finance have kicked in?

Black Star Ranch wrote:

Boy oh boy! How many times have I heard phrases like THIS in the past 2 1/2 - 3-years? If I had a dime for every time ..........

Right. 2010 prediction is maybe fair enough, but a comment on 2011 seems silly and that, in itself, is funny.

Cinco-X wrote:

Greenspan Concedes That the Fed Failed to Gauge the Bubble - NY Times

. . . but is certain it was predicated by Russian default. Certain.

shill wrote:

Is The United States Headed For A Commercial Real Estate Crash Of Unprecedented Magnitude?

"We bring you yesterday's news today, so we're never wrong."

sremood gninrom doog

I just moved here from LA and the cycle here lags everywhere else.

I hear here what I heard in LA 2 years ago, even the though the CSI lags only about 9-10 months. People think it's different here.

Just wait until Boeing pulls out...

Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

sremood gninrom doog

˙ןɐuǝʌnɾ 'ƃuıuɹoɯ pooƃ

real estate check wrote:

Just wait until Boeing pulls out...

Boeing doesn't 'pull out'... its in and out and in and out... over time going back decades. Prolly an 'out phase' coming for sure though - at least that's what I sense from contacts in Wichita & also at their Tier Ones but the cycles are long and the 'in phase' will eventually return - as always - about the time no one expects it.

Steven Roach on Bloomberg TV says statements that China is manipulating its currency from Americans (Krugman in particular) are "the height of hypocrisy".

I agree, and have said so many times.

america would never manipulate anything! You are dealing in blasphemy!

The parts of Florida that are in deep trouble, are those that were built on retirement (and/or secondary vacation homes). This would be the west coast, beginning around Pasco County, all the way down to Naples, almost all of the east coast, and the panhandle over around Destin, etc. The center of the state saw less of this behaviour (with the possible exception of the Ocala to Disney corridor).

There are foreclosures and problems everywhere tho, but the extreme problems are near the salt-water. One example of a cascading failure is a lumber mill not far from me (formerly owned by GP). The mill has been closed for 18 months, due to the slack demand for lumber used in home building. The laid off employees have been scrambling to find jobs wherever they can. Those guys didn't try to walk out on a breezy limb, but they got sideswiped by the rest of the economic mess.

From what I can see, most of the Georgia problems are similar to Florida, except concentrated around Atlanta.

1 currency now -yogi wrote:

I agree, and have said so many times.

+1,000,000.

Ben manipulates dollar: good.

China manipulates currency: bad.

Say what?

the one mistake you shouldn't make if you go on Colbert is to think you can outsmart him. Matalin made that mistake. Several times.

noob goldberg wrote:

He's such a tease, but he hasn't been following through lately.

It's like watching grass grow these days. It wasn't that long ago that the kind of movement over the past week happened every day.

Nope, he made his money on clips in the late 60's, and then became a financial guru.

Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

Nope, he made his money on clips in the late 60's, and then became a financial guru.

Oh yeah, here it is:

Roach Says `Take Out the Baseball Bat’ on Krugman Over His Stance on Yuan

March 19 (Bloomberg) — Morgan Stanley Asia Chairman Stephen Roach said a “baseball bat” should be taken to economist Paul Krugman over his call for the U.S. to pressure China into allowing the yuan to appreciate. “We should take out the baseball bat on Paul Krugman — I mean I think that the advice is completely wrong,” Roach said in an Bloomberg Television interview in Beijing when asked about Krugman’s call, characterized as akin to taking a baseball bat to China. “We’re lashing out at China rather than tending to our own business,” which is raising U.S. savings , Roach said. “I’m a little surprised at Steve for saying that,” said Krugman, the Princeton University professor and Nobel laureate in economics, in a telephone interview when asked to respond to Roach. “What I said is actually based on pretty careful economic analysis. We have a world economy which is depressed by China artificially keeping its currency undervalued.”

crazyv wrote:

even these doomsters don't address what I believe to be the single greatest threat to commercial real estate- demand destruction. In the case of office space - I don't think that an economic recovery (if it occurs) will generate the historic level of demand for office space because of increased telecommuting and flex time

I'm going to go one step further - the companies don't need the bodies on site or via telecommute - office automation & ERP have made many of those tasks fully redundant. Not all - but many. When the recovery kicks in we'll need a much larger pick up in activity than we saw prior to the recession just to re-employ those who were laid off. That isn't happening soon.

Rob Dawg wrote:

What's different this time is that the Corporate HQ is no longer in the PNW but Chicago. This time they mean it.

I remember when they moved the HQ there - it was sort of a Pyrrhic victory... it meant a few high end corporate jobs but it also meant they'd never ever have a mfg base in Illinois. They made that clear - never again would they have their mfg on top of mgmt - makes it harder to pressure during strikes.

I'd guess there will be final airframe assembly in Washington for at least another generation of platforms.

noob goldberg wrote:

Oh, and can anyone explain to me how this quad-witching thing works? I thought everything settled at the end of the trading day, but since the Dow has already moved almost 200 million shares I assume that some of the contracts already settled to cause that trading volume. Does anyone know which contracts settle early, or is all the moving around just prepping for the end of the day?

Futures and options on equity indexes are cash settled. Equity options and ETF options are physically settled. Any in the money cash settled options require cash for the difference between strike and settlement. If you are hedged with stock, you'll need to sell it to flatten your position and raise cash to meet any assignment notice you get. Most cash settled index option are "am settled" meaning a special settlement value is calculated based on the opening print of each stock in the index. This is almost always different from where the actual index opens at 9:30am EST since the 9:30 print in the index may not always reflect all the stocks since some are slow to open.

Usually settlement values are published by around 12:00 noon EST. For example, for SPX options compare the opening SPX "print" or index level with the actual SPX option settlement value today. It will be published sometime today under the symbol SET. Expiring SPX options do not trade today, they can only be exercised. So if you were short SPX calls and hedged with stock, once you find out how much in or out of the money those calls are based on the value of SET vs the strike of the call you are short, you'll need to liquidiate enough stock to raise cash and/or take off your hedge to flatten. If you let the short calls expire and keep you long stock hedge, you'll have significant exposure over the weekend.

noob goldberg wrote:

Oh, and can anyone explain to me how this quad-witching thing works?

. The March Dow Jones futures settled at the cash price calculated by valuing each of the 30 components at each one's opening price after 8:30 EST. At that time the March futures futures have stop trading.