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The Florida CRE Implosion Visualized
A reader submits the following photo essay on the absolute commercial real estate carnage in Florida. Has to be seen to be believed: you will not see these pictures anywhere in traditional media.
He also provides the following color:
I took a drive this evening from 5.30 pm - 7.30 pm and shot over 200 pictures of Florida real estate in crisis. What is really amazing if you notice the time and date on each picture . I was able to shoot a picture about every 45 seconds while all alone driving in traffic including stopping for traffic lights and gas and parking in a safe place each time for each shot . Everywhere you turn something is for lease or rent.
All these headlines in the media dont seem to have any effect on people so here is one road in one town ( out of thousands ) in Fort Lauderdale Florida up to Pompano Beach ( about 8 miles ) I pretty much only shot the right side of the street because I did not want to do any u turns . Some pics I shot across the street . This does not even include office buildings .
There is something for lease or rent in almost every single plaza or strip mall without exception . I also missed a lot more because of traffic and buildings set back from the street. This does not even include offices , homes , condos etc, this is just stuff abandoned or had a sign in front of it and I missed a LOT of signs . This is not even all the empty lots that sit because the developer abandoned the project after buying up the whole neighborhood .
This is Fort Lauderdale Florida . The Gold Coast , The Venice of America the Yachting capital of the world folks.The pictures start at the Fort lauderdale beach on Sunrise Blvd. and go west to federal Highway ( rte 1 ) north to Pompano Beach about 8 miles and finish in a random warehouse district off the main road . After that it got dark and I had to stop .
You will see Exotic car dealerships Burger King, Wendys , Fuddruckers , Hooters , Pier one , furniture stores , restaurants , clubs boat dealers, Business that have been there 20 + years , Supermarkets , Saks 5th avenue ( big white building in beginning ) Macks groves , Flaming Pit , the old 50's diner . A Ford dealer and a Dodge dealer . A golf course in beginning of slideshow . All GONE in just one 8 mile strip . Folks this is the good side of town with the money I did not even go to the other side of the tracks or to other streets just one !!!
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skateboarders paradice! nothing to see here folks, move along.
Shocking.
too lazy to post pix, S Cali looks as bad. There are 6(!!) new condo refurbished into apartment buildings within 2 mile radius on Brodway, Santa Monica, and it's just one street, brand new buildings with shiny signs, lease, sale, etc. As of Down Town, LA don't get me started. There are around dozen high rise towers in works :)
Irvine, CA by UCI is like a ghost town most of the CRE was completed within last two years and is half empty.
San Diego, Downtown is a joke, I overheard several K of new vacant units....
Well, needless to say...that was very humbling.
Time to short short SRS!
Why would you short SRS?
Wouldn;t you be buying SRS?
You wouldn't not be shorting SRS short.
My wife is the English major, and while I think I have parsed the reply correctly, I'm not sure if the "short" after SRS is a reference to the trading vehicle, or a verb. And how I haandle that can flip the answer.
Therefore, can I ask for a one word answer to this?
Would you be a buyer of SRS under these circumstances? I think I can work with a "yes" or a "no."
Now if it's a "no" feel free to tell me why, but not required...LOL
Thanks
I woulldn't touch the inverse leveraged ETF's. As noted at ZH yesterday, der issa soma funny beezy-anessa going on. UBS the latest to inform their clients, no canna buy certain ETF's, and if the rst of the story is accurate, they have to liquidate existing positions by Aug. 3.
Forced selling- fuck what next?
I took my bike for a ride through downtown St. Petersburg last weekend. I kid you not, there is a sign that reads "Free Rent Available." Perhaps I will take my camera next time and share the picture with everyone. It's good for a laugh....
Btw there was an article in the Tampa Tribune a couple months ago about the unpaid commercial propety taxes just in Tampa alone. The figure was north of $300 million, wonder what it is now. Also, Hillsborough County has the highest unemployment in all of Florida last time a checked.
Additionally, I'd like to give a shout out to the good work by the photog and the hard working staff at ZH. Thanks.
Second that.
+1
I was in downtown Portland this weekend, very similar, every other store out of business, soon the whole country will look the same.
Silicon Valley is the same sort of ghost town. Nothing but Available and For Lease. Starting to see For Sale now on a lot of the industrial real estate.
Shopping centers are starting to see more and more vacancies in the strip malls. I see some major centers start to bring in furniture stores and antique stores, the bottom of the food chain, and those that pay almost nothing in rent per square foot. These are fillers to keep the place from looking dead.
No offense, but big deal? I can show you the same thing from Connecticut with way more vacancy packed per mile.
Deutsche bank had a huge beat but I am not in the mood to congratulate. Most of that came from dealing our own treasuries and trading this short squeeze. Asset management is down and the Huntsman blowup is also 1.4 bil of a write off. Squeezing away with our own tax money.
You should have seen these areas only one year ago. The depression unfolded very rapidly and very severely here. Many of the locations captured in those photos were the busiest, most resilient parts of the metro area. I know people who've lived here all their lives, and they've never seen anything like it, not even close.
People will be squating in those buildings before this is all through.
Sorry, this is off topic.
Tyler, I would appreciate if you would include more information in the post summaries instead of having to make me click for every one.
I've been reading this blog religiously since March and it's hard enough to follow without having to blindly guess if a post is worth clicking for more info or not.
From entire posts visible to the headline and one cryptic sentence description?
by now you must know too well that every post is worth clicking :)
but i hear you and will make the intro more relevant. The reason why in some cases the teaser is "shorter" is so that we can fit it in the highlighted articles section on top without totally destroying the formatting.
My vote, FWIW, is to go back to showing the full post. Then just have the comments hidden maybe with a button that expands all the comments out for those who want to see them/comment.
I at least skim through every post here. So clicking in and out of each one serves no use for me.
(Just my 2 cents, content is more important and it is still fantastic.)
For folks not on a 'broker setup' with the browser maxxed across 2 x 15in panels, could we remove the blue box(es) on the left (and relocate to right side)?
This would improve the site readability mucho, and allow the full post listing mentioned above.
By the site reduction in speed this am, I'm guessing your traffic here has tripled, which may imply that 70%+ of people where sticking reading blogger til the bitter end.
Thanks for all the great work on your posts!
I second this. On the old blog site I enjoyed reading every single post. Now I have to click - and wow is my index finger is exhausted!
+1
The party's over. The phony HELOC wealth is long ago spent. Last one out, turn off the lights...
What? Oh no my friend, didn't you hear about Wells Fargo's new CELOC program (no kidding)? That's right, car equity line of credit. After that's gone, welcome to KELOC: the kidney equity line of credit.
According to the recent New Jersey racketeering case, Rabbi's were getting $150,000 for them on the market - good call!
LOL. One W.S. was way ahead of the curve as regards the POFLOC.
(Link on the POFLOC failed, sorry)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice
LOL. I think you're joking, but in case anyone is wondering CELOC is a commercial equity line of credit. Bad enough, but not quite as bad as a car equity LOC. LOL
This deserves mention as a ZH headline.
Last time I read that was on a billboard in Seattle in 1970 when Boeing nearly collapsed.
You know, it's apt that TD makes a post about this now, because I spent much of the weekend before last running DD on CRE in the suburbs north of Orlando. It's as bad or worse than this, strip mall after strip mall at 0-25% of capacity, never-occupied office buildings in queasy pastel... it reminded me of the Eastern Europe vacation pics. New construction too, totally DOA. An abandoned Land Rover dealership, a Kimco property with every major tenant gone (corner of 436/17-92), boarded-up country clubs, and literally hundreds of CB Richard Ellis Group For Rent signs scorched on my corneas.
My personal favorite is the unfinished 20-story skyscraper built by Fundies trying to cash in on the CRE goldmine. Construction stopped in 2007 but the city (Altamonte Springs) forced them to cover the concrete skeleton in mirrored glass so it would fool people from a distance. A 20 story glass box with nothing inside: is there anything more symbolic of the American Zeitgeist in the Year of Our Lord 2009?
More on the "Mistake by the Lake" here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1151564/the_mistake_by_the_lake...
I worked for CBRE Orlando for a hot minute, my old boss has repeatedly told me he and everyone is "getting their nads crushed right now"
That Superchannel building has been an everlasting eyesore, and reminds me of the fight club quote:
"You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you [and your misguided CRE development venture]. "
"it reminded me of the Eastern Europe vacation pics"
I lived in Poland for seven years in the 90's and traveled all over Eastern Europe - sure, there were plenty of ugly buildings done in classic socialist-realist style, but never anything resembling the ghost town scenes in this pictorial. Unreal.
To those who think the photographer cherry-picked empty blocks, he didn't. I recognize a lot of those photos as being from the busiest, most fashionable areas around, many very near the beach and some right up against waterways. The photos are reasonably representative of the condition that such fashionable areas are in now.
Worse, if you go west into the less-fashionable suburbs, you see even worse desolation - if I were doing this photo project, I would have done it 5-10 miles further west to illustrate the CRE ghost town effect. Finally, if you go to the poor parts of town, you also see this effect in commercial real estate, although to some degree such scenes aren't actually new. Just the extent of it is new.
Harder to capture from the streets are the doomed new high rise luxury condos. They look fine from the outside, but in an increasing number of cases the buildings are economically impossible to keep alive because there aren't enough tenants to spread out ordinary maintenance costs. There is a hundred mile long swath from Miami to West Palm that's dotted with highrises destined to result in extreme loss severity.
Looks like a 2 hour drive either north or south on US 1 in Broward County
I used google maps to find Florida 870. Turns out Florida 870 intersects with US 1 in Fort Lauderdale. There must be 6 golf country clubs within a 6 mile radius of the airport. Amazing in a bad way.
PS, for even more amusement, note the contextual ads that adsense thinks are relevant to this post.
LOL, drug & alcohol rehab, liposuction, and commercial real estate mgmt. Either robots are tone deaf or they know what we really need.
OMFG. I just saw an ad for Circuit City. I'm not kidding.
Pain Management Clinic. Hey, its on target.
i am sorry but all i see are green shoots....this will send the market roaring tomorrow to 9500 and that's only the beginning....are you people trying to start another credit bubble??
all this means is that property will be bought at low prices and then healthy investors will come in to tear down the dilapidated property so that they can build new high rises, highway, and other badly needed infrastructure....
implosion? i think not.....we can grow produce and take it to the farmer's market where we can sell it free to raise money for the poor people....
Totally agreed. Forget the kids' college fund - I'm shorting the SRS and going 100% URE.
And is this really a recession? DK and other wise people say we're fine - so we must be! I mean as long as you ignore the little things like math...
This is so sad, you can easily picture how many lives were destroyed. Welcome to The United States of Walmart, folks. Make sure you are home (in case you still have one) when the Fed is going to send you the brand new bubble.
That is one of the ugliest towns that I've ever seen. How long before nature takes it back?
Amen.
Amen.
Don't trust guys who drive white Ford Explorers :)
I've noticed that one as well. Plus in one of the pictures you can almost see the driver... quick CNBC... the first reporter who finds the driver gets a bonus and the warren buffet romantic package with becky quick!
Go easy with the Ford explorer jokes . I used to have a luxury car dealership.
Off topic, but did the Peoples Republic of China just get the go ahead to buy New Zealand and Australia from Odumbo? Parabolic yen crosses.
The dollar is crashing!
Not against the yen. The charade ends when usd/jpy break down. Maybe 91 will ring some bells.
Yen's up a bit. Look at the Aussie and Canadian dollar moves. What's happened?
If the cad and aud were killing the usd, then ok, Asians are looking at the Treasury schedule this week and selling our money cause 200 bil is too much in one week. Ok. However, the move is the same against the jpy, which makes me suspect that this is just some front runnign for Toushin issues later this week. aka wild speculation.
AUD is strong on technicals, such as the big four dumping USD borrowings into AUD to cover their huge black holes they call balance sheets. Real AU economy going to hell. Massive budget deficits as well as trade deficits coming as China clears out their real AU holdings... and China is lending to AU in USD, which are being dumped by the big four (viscous circle). This allows china to get more USD on clearing AUD assets so they can then lend more USD to be dumped by the big four for AUD.
No, somethings not right. Something significant is happening right now.
Well what then?
Don't know, but there is an event happening as we speak.
The cad, nzd, aud went berzerk when mainland China opened. Could be as simple as the People's Bank of China beating down the dollar as a little warning to Odumbo?
ahhh....the Chinese are meeting the Americans for high level talks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/world/28strategy.html?em
This is high level bravado. We see this every day from Treasury and the Fed as they try to convince us we are missing the liftoff from Armegeddon when we know Armageddon is just a few months away.
I can go to sleep now.
A couple of years ago I was encouraged to pay YEN for purchase from China. Though, it's funny that China are still quoting in USD. They are just waving a big stick. China is collecting its USD so that it can buy the US. You guys need to pay attention to Chinese Military Generals and the speeches they give.
Inflation is a no-go.
My God, its getting worse. A summertime crisis. Who woulda thought. If I had only the foresight to start a chopper service from the Hampton's to NYC, I would be rich.
Lack of snow... just terrible.
Or maybe there are massive AUD tax liabilities out there... which need to be paid by end 28th (i.e., today)
does not explain the cad and the nzd
They run on the same time frame. People betting massive and winning against a fall or rise in any of those markets have to pay, so they have to clear their other reserves to pay the taxes so they don't unwind their positions.
What it's saying is that there is a lot of foreign activity in those markets. Everyone wants to play the 'commodity currencies' Haven't you heard?
Maybe Soros ODed on Viagra and decided to take down the bank again. But this time he's pissed at kangaroos, instead of lords with funny hair.
I'm not a forex/bond expert, but is this usd beating a sign that bondzilla is here? Are people expecting a failed usd bond auction this weak and getting out of usd? To me it seems that aud might be a nice hedge, giving the rba's recent bullish outlook for the aussie economy?
Not only did US futures not turn positive during the night (that I could see), now gold just dropped $4 since 7am. Weak USD correlation, where?
Gold just dropped another $10 in the last couple minutes... This is getting good. Wait until gold & silver ETNs are 'not suitable' for brokerage accounts, due to XYZ.
Aussie Gov Stevens' comments implied that RBA would start raising rates soon.
That sent the AUD skyrocketing. Took the Kiwi along a little bit; although they came out with some weak numbers beforehand.
CAD wasn't correlated that well, really. The USD/CAD was close to breaking 1.80/1.79 key support before this, and the sudden USD weakness as people flocked to AUD/USD was enough to take out USD/CAD stops under previous support. People stepped in and bought it, though, after it free-fell to 1.75.
Some significant news was the sell orders flooding EUR/USD @ 1.43.
It does not make sense for China to beat down the USD via the AUD. What am I missing?
China is not forcing the AUD up against the USD. The AU banks are... in doing so China can clear out its AUD to the USD at a better rate.
Glen Stevens (of the RBA) talking up the AUD ........ what a moron !! Bernie has said low rates forever and this imbecile wants to choke off any recovery with a strong currency !!
The popular notion that Aus central bankers know what they are doing is complete horseshit. These are the same people who raised rates in 07 and 08 when the macro was screaming at them to cut, then they panicked and cut 450 bps.
He talks of a housing bubble developing in Australia.... welll, no shit !!! Every asshole who turns up gets up to a 50 k grant (with my tax dollars) to fund their first house.... When my kids want a house I expect to see no free money for them yet my tax rate will be 65%
More carry !!! Send it to parity
End of rant
I keep waiting for reality to hit and every day the markets trend higher. Today was the first day I can recall where clients contacted me and voiced their growing frustration about 'being in cash' - (I was lucky enough to be about 80% cash during the peak to valley.. but missed the March to July rally). I get the sense that if things don't follow through and get ugly soon.. I'm going to hemmorage clients in the next 6 months.. as other brokers boast of making a 'killing' on those same stocks that we all 'used to think' were bankrupt. I will freely admit I hate my job right now.. I read Rosie.. I see the writing on the wall and am trying to do the right thing but the f*ing market just keeps defying gravity - it blows.. ya know?
hard to feel comfortable trading when you can see the 'real economy' - kinda like someone wasting time running around the Titanic grabbing wallets from the state rooms as the ship goes down - I'm the guy saying, 'dude.. look at the bigger picture.. you need to focus on being safe.. not dicking around trying to pick up a couple of bucks..'
anyhow.. thx TD for all of the great info.. you guys rock.
/vent
;p
not being a fund manager or playing one on tv
i would have advised swing trading or playing
the trends rather than the fundamentals....the
early stages of a depression are rife with sucker
rallies and desperate hope that things will
return to normal....so you were not wrong but
neither were you right.....however.....
just read that david winters has 1/7 of his
portfolio in short term government securities....
you may actually be in the right place now....john
paulson has 30% of his stash in gold etf alone - all
total 4.3b in gold related securities.....his
only mistake is not having physical gold and he
will pay dearly for that error....
so i think your mind is in the right place....things
are going to get stupid crazy in september....
keep the seat belt fastened and parachute
attached....
Thx for the reply - I'm not going to change my views just because the market is going up for reasons that don't make sense to me.. so as you say.. I'll stick to my guns.Ironcially the last time I lost a 'lot' of clients was 1999 because I refused to buy Nortel, Dell and cisco at a kazillion times earnings.. ;p
good for you cheeze
I 2nd that emotion....I live by a little saying: when markets are bad, clients never remember when they where good, when markets are good, they never remember when they where bad. I keep thinking the same thing day in day out. So far, I've only had a few clients question missing the "growth."
stick to your guns... a penny saved...
Cheese:
Any clients you lose will be replaced by referrals from the clients you have protected from the coming tsunami.
Welcome to the Mississippi of the mid 1990's
Really little has changed here the past few years. We pretty well got to this level once all the factories moved to China.
This is a fairly small town of around 2,000 people but up until the mid 90's we had 2 factories up and running. Now other than the law offices (where i work) or the school it's a good hour+ drive to find any type of a decent job.
Also the North of England of the mid-80's. Just shuttered commercial property as far as the eye could see.
This month, it was the first time that I actually saw that we are getting into a crisis that is getting worse FAST. In the summer, it's always more easy to get to work because there is less traffic.
Now: You only see cars driving on the road every 200 yards!
I live in Belgium (Europe) and here we are hitting unofficial unemployment rates of 22%. But we already have cities that are hitting 75% unemployment.
One year ago: we where faced with a hughe shortage of workers. Our population is aging (half are seniors and 1/4 are kids and work unabled people). Now, whe have already hughe unemployment and its going to grow fast.
Here we have (i don't know the word) when somebody who lost his job he gets the first 9 months his full salary from the state, and then it goes down to 70% for the next 6 months and then to 60% where it stays. Now there are a lot of unemployed who start to see a drop in their checks down to 70%!
Creepy...
mmmmm....if you are getting 60% of your salary
while unemployed you are living high on the hog...
that is extraordinarily generous and luxurious...
in the state of ga usa the maximum you will get
per week is 330 usd no matter how much
you earned employed....that's right folks you
will receive a teensy weensy itsy bitsy polka dot
bikini sized check with taxes withheld which
will take it well below 300 usd.....
consider yourself in fortunate.
on the other hand europe has chronically high
unemployed due to generous social welfare so
the trade-off is normally not that good.
Just enough for you to pay your health insurance premium.
Can anyone hazard guess as to why SRS is not well up on these facts that all banks and large firms know?
....crickets....
I have lost $25K on this no-brainer so far, and it's infuriating.
T-A-L-F. Taxpayers will just backstop trillions in bonds to buy up (allow unloading of) anything being priced at less than 2007 valuations.
I had hoped someone savvy could have answered this myself; IYR has gone up, SRS down. My only answer is the obvious ones, the powers that be buying IYR, and selling/shorting SRS- exactly because it is such a no-brainer.
If you look at the IYR holding's you see highly exposed CRE companies. I don't get it. Would love to hear anyone's opinion also.
You do see some highly exposed to CRE. Otherwise, on one hand you have NLY, which is one of the better plays right now. Then you have PCL, which is letting their green shoots rot rather than harvest right now.
Green shoots are the weeds coming out of the cracks in the abandoned asphalt parking lots! When you see ghost towns like this, it really hits home, and I fear for our future.
not to worry....odumbo will pass a 12 trillion
usd stimulus package later this year....then
everything will be back to normal.
in the mean time i think we will see greenshoots grow
out of bernanke's ass...
Today, our government has declared a warning that says our Banks could implode in the short term.
Dexia, KBC and ING
Not sure what country you are from Anon?
he's from belgium or luxembourg, but i think belgium ...those banks are majority owned by belgiums ..
Can you tell me your scource?
Thanks.
Here in Germany- nothing to see.
No crisis.
How long before you have another ten million immigrants looking for work.
as long as takes french immigrants to burn down france
:-O
They dont even count in the GFK consumer confidence index(no joke)
So they dont matter.
After the election, we will see.
The coming second and massive leg down in the U.S. system:
http://truthingold.blogspot.com/2009/07/its-prime-time-stage-2-of-us-col...
Yea but hasn't Zero Hedge scared you away from shorting the market?
You'll be trading against the feared Goldman-Sachs High Frequency Trading robots that sit right in front of a exchange and account for a whopping 70% of all trading volume...
Are you not scared??!!
don't look now but the usdx is down 25 b-points....78.35...more fertilizer for green shoots and urban renewal.....
what else are the powers that be going to say?
they have to pump, no choice. Ill be in my bunker with my gun,gold and canned food. later
The stretch between Fort Myers and Naples on the Tamiami Trail has made a lot of sign painters rich this past year. When I drove it last, there were vacant 1/3-finished strip malls with pallets of wet, ruined drywall just sitting in front of the windowless buildings. One day last year, the workers must have just said "fvkc it" and went home after not being paid.
What the hell are they going to do with all this unused capacity? Catepillar hasn't made enough bulldozers yet to deal with it all.
I dubbed in Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World" while watching this with Dennis Kneale.
I have lived in Fort Lauderdale for the past ten years, less than 500 feet from the road that theses pictures were taken at. I can tell you that watching South Florida deteriorate for the past two years has been sad and devastating. This is exactly what this looks like, but sadly what the photos don't capture is all the crime as a result of all these vacancies. There is much sadness and desperation in South Florida to the point that it may take years if ever to recover. I am sure that this is going on all over the country, but South Florida was hit particularly hard due to grossly inflated real estate prices. There was so much "flipping" in the market here and so much false wealth in this part of the county that things could have never sustained that level of inflation. The theory that "the higher you climb the harder you fall" is true and trust me folks, at it's peak South Florida was a beautiful shining speculation of money and glamour and now it is reduced to what looks like a third world country.
We're neighbours.
Virtually all my 'professional' peers are trying to leave. Many have an anvil in the form of a mortgage around their necks. Not I. When I'm done gradschool I'm out of here. Was thinking Dallas. Or maybe Houston. Austin too. San Antonio? 70% of all jobs created in the USA in 2008 were in Texas.
You can hope for a productive Hurricane season.
Good. There's way too much crap in Florida anyway. Hopefully this will all erode away. Oh yeah, except for the strip clubs, Ft. Lauderdale is a toilet.
Not to mention Tamiami Trail up in Sarasota. Place is like the verizon dead zone... Creeping up towards main street. How much bric-a-brac do people really need? At least traffic is better...
i think its worth noting that a lot of these pictures are duplicates ... showing the same property more than once ... and that some of the businesses didn't close, they relocated [pompano ford comes to mind]. thats not to suggest that things aren't bad; they are. i simply prefer to attempt to maintain perspective.
The pics are from my 'hood. Headin up that way right now. It gets worse with every passing week. My favorite resturants are all gone and about all that is standing are thrift stores and a few delusional estate agents and such.
In end, I assume this will be good (after it is horrible). The startup cost for small businesses will be significantly smaller, from the rent side. No?
I could do a similar panorama here in Northwest Broward County - about 25 miles NW of Ft. Lauderdale.
Someone from Miami could shoot the condo canyons for different depressing look.
Somewhat off topic - I tuned into the middle of an NPR (might have been a local) show anyway talking about adding horse racing - at Miami International? Say what - must have been a joke. I cannot wait until "they" try to float the bonds to actually build the new retractable roofed stadium for the Florida Marlins on the site of the old Orange Bowl.
Pete
I think I will take a drive down Collins and take some pics. The rows of empty "upscale" condos is unreal.
If that is the good side of town, I would hate to see the bad side... nice work!
I don't know what would make anyone think that NYC is going to do much better. See http://boombustblog.com/20090527981/Who-are-ya-gonna-believe-the-pundits... and http://boombustblog.com/200906171010/Who-re-are-you-going-to-believe-the...
Here in the mid-west the faux-economy allowed for massive urban sprawl, taking productive farmland for the sake of residential and commercial development. People got rich from this scheme, but it's now come to a screeching halt.
I'm of the same mindset as Kuntsler, that the sprawl now has been proven unsustainable and the strip malls that came in along with those developments are now on a permanent downward spiral. Residentially these places will eventually prove to be uninhabitable.
Budgetary constraints will limit what services (police?) can efficiently be deployed to outlying areas and these areas will become vulnerable to gang / thug takeover. Abandonment in these areas will cause more abandonment and the self-fulfilling prophecy will only bring more.
The epic contraction economically, will become visible in wrecked suburban tracts that no one wants to live in because of safety issues and loss of services. A logical conclusion then is that if you can sell and get out now, even at a loss, you'll be better off than staying put and battening down the hatches. Either that or (as we're witnessing) just walk away.
my .02
Although it's not Florida, DRE is prepping for a 150M share offering. Time to frontrun the upgrades and Merrill (et al) pumping!
Most of these are less than A-level properties. I suggest they level all this crap to make room for shiny new high-rise condos or town homes.
Yea, take a 2 hour drive across Alligator Alley and check out Naples-Ft Myers/Cape Coma.
Ground Zero.
We'll be buyers in about 12 - 18 mo but now just working on the tan and enjoying the Zero Hedge articles.
Bill Rudin was on cnbc yesterday (with Bill Griffin and "tits") pushing the schtick that they signed tons and tons of new office leases in Manhattan, but, minor point that he mentioned rather quickly, office rents are down 30% - 50%.
If anyone has the clip, please post, thanks.
I was in FL last month and I can tell you it felt like a ghost town.
I was in Destin, FL last week. Place was hopping. 4 out of 5 cars were from out of state. I think it was more of people who would have previously gone to Caribbean or Mexico or even Europe, choosing to drive somewhere closer to home. Lots of GA, AL, MS, TN, NC and TX license plates.
They have one of those upscale outdoor malls, which was packed, however casual observation was while people were buying Starbucks and ice cream, very few were toting shopping bags. The ones that did, were generally holding one small one.
I heard just this morning that all three of the great used book stores in Berkeley are gone.
"For Lease" or "Space Available" Signs are everywhere in the bayarea, San Francisco, silicon valley!
Around the corner from me was a strip mall with a Great Indoors, a Circuit City, and a Linens and Things. Opened 5 years ago. All tremendously huge stores. All bankrupt.
WHY is there a pic of Ferrari of Fort Lauderdale? They are still open for business. ??? PLEASE EXPLAIN.
Ferrari is doing great and building a new building. I mention that in my blog.
Please Note Ferrari is building a beautifull new dealership. I guess that is where Goldman Sachs employees will spend their money.
http://gilco1.blogspot.com/
New York City is getting to be like this, too. We need to elect new mayors in each of our cities.
In Missouri there's a city of around 14,000 20 miles from where I live and one piece of real estate once intended to have a Target, regional supermarket chain store, and a strip mall is just a big empty parking lot with the strip mall having one Buffalo Wild Wings, a flooring company, and a steak house being built across the lost.
Across from the Wal-Mart a strip mall was built with only one store currently there, a Gamestop and an AT&T being moved there from a few blocks away.