It was quite a week of action for CWS, particularly for our risk management, safety, construction, operations, asset management, human resources, marketing, and maintenance teams. We have been having very early calls (at least for me on the west coast) every morning, including over the Labor Day weekend,
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With the extraordinary events that took place in Houston, southeast Texas, and Louisiana as a result of Hurricane Harvey I felt that it was much more relevant to discuss this catastrophe versus part two of demographics and interest rates emphasizing Japan.
Houston: Hurricane Harvey
An estimated 27 trillion gallons of water has blanketed southeast Texas and parts of Louisiana.
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Gary Carmell
Posted in Apartments, Economy, Interest Rates, Investing, News, Wealth
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Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio have both come out and said that despite America being such a strong country and performing well economically, not all is right when looking under the hood.
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I have often made the case that apartments and home rentals are highly valuable because of the flexibility they provide people to move for whatever reason. Housing became way over-owned in the 2000s and this did great damage to our economy and society. I finally came across some interesting research that explored how damaging it was for underwater homeowners in terms of limiting their geographic flexibility to seek out employment and how this impacted their long-term earning power.
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Gary Carmell
Posted in Advice, Apartments, Economy, Investing, News, Uncategorized, Wealth
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Sir Isaac Newton famously said in 1676,
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Scientific advancement and all forms of knowledge and innovation is cumulative and does not happen in a vacuum.
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Gary Carmell
Posted in Apartments, Economy, Interest Rates, Investing, Market Bubbles, News, Uncategorized, Wealth
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The old adage is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As Ben Graham said, it’s not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ideas that go too far that can do the most damage. A perfect example of this was the drive for more Americans to own homes,
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[UPDATED July 27, 2016] Since 2010 apartments have performed very well across the nation. The following graph from REIS (courtesy of Calculatedriskblog), a real estate research service, shows the trend in vacancy rates for larger apartment communities.
REIS – from 1990 – 2014
It’s clear from the graph that the market bottomed from an occupancy perspective in 2010.
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Gary Carmell
Posted in Apartments, Economy, Interest Rates, Investing, News, Stock History, Trends, Uncategorized, Wealth
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Rather than diving into deep philosophical exposition and heavy economics, I thought I would go a different direction this week and share some random thoughts and items that have caught my attention recently.
My 14 Random Thoughts
Garry Shandling –
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Gary Carmell
Posted in Advice, Apartments, Economy, News, Wealth
The U.S. apartment market continues to perform extremely well. According to a recent report from CBRE, vacancy rates are near 15-year lows as new supply is being easily absorbed as demand exceeds supply nationally. The nation’s 62 largest apartment markets had a second quarter vacancy rate of 4.2%.
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We have been strong advocates of the premise that renter household formations will continue to capture a larger percentage of overall household formations. Clearly the United States economy became irrationally focused and reliant upon homeownership during the bubble days of 2003-7. While we knew that apartments would not stage any type of meaningful recovery while the economy was contracting from 2008 through 2009,
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