In recent times, building owners have been holding back from selling hoping that prices will improve to previous levels seen in 2006 and 2007. However, it is apparent that no such improvement is going to happen in the near future. Thus, if capital is strongly required by the owners, real estate sales will take place today at a 20% to 30% discount from previous highs.

Most institutional property owners—especially colleges and universities, hospitals and town and county governments—are seeing sources of income decline significantly in the current market.

If capital is required for construction or renovation while fundraising and tax and income revenue streams are declining—while at the same time institutional lending has dropped significantly—there’s little hope for addressing the immediate needs of the organization.

Green Key's client and its international private equity investors structure purchase and sale-leaseback deals on properties in the following classes: commercial; office; medical; higher education; town and county government; mixed-use; and, industrial.

Green Key's client’s private equity investors and international real estate investment trust partners are discovering opportunities for long-term investment appreciation in markets across the U.S. and world. These are long-term investors who seek to purchase commercial, governmental, educational and professional properties at or near current appraised values.

The sale-leaseback option including the option of sale-leasebacks, our client wishes to evaluate qualifying properties and, in the case of those properties that meet its criteria, to finalize offers within 15 days in most cases.

ACQUISITION CRITERIA

Credit Rating: AAA through Unrated

TRANSACTION TYPES:

Sale-leaseback; acquisition from third parties or build-to-suit; development funding for investment-grade tenants; forward commitments to purchase at completion for non-investment-grade tenants.

LEASE STRUCTURE:

Double-net, triple-net, or bondable lease.

TERM:

10 years minimum remaining term (prefer 15 years or longer).

RENTS:

Initial rents at or below local real estate market; stepped with periodic fixed increases; renewal rents fixed up-front in some cases.

TRANSACTION SIZE:

$10 million minimum; $1 billion maximum.

As the economic requirement allows, new buildings will be built or expanded. With many of the government tax and subsidy benefits in green building, we have formed a joint venture with a building material company that supplies a natural indoor/outdoor wall panel with features geared to maximize green, safety, insulation, wind resistance and fireproofing standards.

LED lighting, solar PV, water filtration and other green upgrades will be incorporated as the project allows.

Please contact me for more information.

Chris Bartle
chris@greenkeyrealestate.com

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From: Jetson Green

Blu Relaunches Glidehouse Green Prefab

By Preston Koerner | August 24, 2010 | topics: Modern architecture, Prefab

Blu Homes continues to dominate the green prefab world. Today the company announced the relaunch of Glidehouse, a gorgeous home originally made famous by Michelle Kaufmann. Glidehouse will be available nationally and built in Blu's own factory using the company's proprietary steel and wood framing system. The new Glidehouse retains all of the signature features of the old design and can be purchased for $360,000+.

When constructed, Glidehouse will be airtight, energy efficient, and built to the standards of the American Lung Association Healthy House program. More specifically, green elements include no-VOC paints, dual-pane windows and doors, FSC certified woods, bamboo flooring, PaperStone countertops, etc.

Massive window walls give Glidehouse fabulous panoramic views, while retractable cedar sunshades can be used to filter light and air as needed.

The home is available with 2-4 bedrooms, 2-3 bathrooms, and anywhere from 1,632-2,244 square feet. Moreover, an optional pod is available from $75,000.

Pricing includes the house, standard materials and finishes, delivery, set up, and finish work by Blu Homes. Pricing does not include permits, excavation, foundation, finish painting, outdoor elements, and some engineering aspects.

From: The Grist

American appetite for big homes is falling

MCLOVIN IT!

American appetite for big homes is falling

by Roger Valdez 24 Aug 2010 4:22 PM

Trulia just released some very compelling charts and graphs based off of recent opinion research suggesting it might be the end of the McMansion -- the huge, mass-produced housing form associated with sprawl.

Their data, together with the drop in lot sizes for single family homes I wrote about last month, might point to a slackening in the demand for homes with lots of square footage. While this likely doesn’t mean a mass exodus of people from outer belts of sprawl into condominiums inside urban growth boundaries, it is a promising trend in tastes and economics that could be leveraged. Maybe now is the time to advance some policies to sustain this momentum. First, let’s check out the charts and graphs.

Here’s one that shows the evolution of American home preference from the 1950s to the present. House size exploded from an average of 983 square feet to more than twice that -- 2,330 square feet today:

click to view

But it appears from Trulia’s research that American’s are shifting their expectations about the size of their homes. This chart shows the American’s ideal home size now:

click to view

Less than 10 percent of Americans consider the McMansion -- defined by Trulia as 3,200 square feet or larger -- as being the ideal home size. Not all big houses are McMansions, however. Trulia is talking here about big houses, all built at once, and sprawling out. It’s the kind of housing form you’d expect in, say, Texas. But a story on CNBC had these two shocking paragraphs:

click to view

Diane Cheatham, owner of Urban Edge Developers in Dallas, said today, the average size of home they’re building is 2,200 square feet, down from 2,500 in 2005 -- which was considered small for Dallas back then.

She said the trend there is more toward building green homes instead of big homes. Right now, they’re building a 1,200-square-foot uber-green home for a couple that’s downsizing from 3,000-square feet, Cheatham explained.

And here we were thinking everything was bigger in Texas. There isn’t any clear consensus about why this is happening, though it seems certain that the economy -- and unemployment in particular -- has a role:

click to view

But we know density and smaller homes are better than mega houses connected by vast networks of highways. What if we made the best of this situation by creating some policies to make it more economical to live inside urban growth boundaries? One idea is what I call the Urban Homesteader Tax Exemption. If you buy a home in certain in-city areas -- perhaps the Pearl District in Portland or Belltown in Seattle -- you’d get a significant federal tax credit like the now expired tax credit for first time home buyers. This would be a boon for older couples downsizing and a huge incentive for first time homebuyers. And it incentivizes what we know to be better -- living in compact communities.

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

From: SF Realtors

Good Time to Buy. Video from SF Assoc of Realtors with great data and forecasts encouraging buying in San Francisco.

From: The Grist

GREENWASH ALERT

Isolated green buildings won’t save the planet, TEDsters argue

by Jonathan Hiskes 23 Aug 2010 1:16 PM

Isolated green buildings won't do much to cut carbon pollution, a trio of architects argue in a TED /CNN partnership. You've got to put those buildings in a sensible place for them to do much good, say Joshua Prince-Ramus, Randolph Croxton, and Tuomas Toivonen:

So-called "green" buildings are simply not sustainable if, for example:

Their occupants drive long distances every day.
The energy they consume is carbon-intensive.
Their technology is too complicated to use or too difficult to maintain.
Their impact stops at the property line.
They deny the use of pre-existing infrastructure or building fabric.
They are conceived in isolation from larger, systemic environmental change.
... "Green" buildings alone are not enough to divert our perilous course. A broader vision of sustainability is imperative to meet America's challenge.

Spot on. But everyone in the green-buildings world already understands this -- if they're halfway informed and halfway honest. Who exactly are the writers refuting?

Real-estate marketers. Plenty of developers tout their homes and buildings as "green," even if they're out on the exurban fringe, where any sort of "sustainable lifestyle" is going to require a ton of driving. Case in point: Prairie Ridge Homes, 40 miles southwest of Chicago, which bills itself as "the nation's first net zero energy community of custom designed homes." The New Lenox site gets a zero on Walk Score, as NRDC's Kaid Benfield notes. The handy tool Abogo finds that the site's average transportation costs per household are 24 percent higher than the Chicago-area average. Carbon emissions from transportation are nearly twice the regional average. Not green.

The TED architects propose solutions that include the expected (urban growth boundaries) and one novel one:

Develop new types of urban structures that, by design, can adapt to a rich variety of unanticipated uses and accommodate new construction technologies as they evolve. This new class of structures would engender the organic, heterogeneous evolution that originally shaped America's cities.

It's tough to predict how a building will be used 40 years from now. Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus delivers a TED talk on his firm's design for a "flexible" theater in Dallas: Click to watch

From: Sustainable Industries

Putting the view back in Bayview

By Charles Redell

Created Jul 30 2010 - 3:31pm
Published: Jul 30 2010 - 3:31pm

Bayview-Hunters Point is an environmentally blighted neighborhood is an understatement. The southeastern San Francisco neighborhood is home to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a Superfund site that has cost $350 million to clean so far, as well as a landfill containing radiological waste and 300 other toxic sites, according to reports.

But now it’s also home to Ecocenter at Heron’s Head Park, a 1,500-square-foot restorative building designed to meet the requirements of the Living Building Challenge 2.0. The center, owned by Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ), operates entirely disconnected from the power grid and treats and re-uses all rainwater, greywater and blackwater onsite.

LEJ is using the “living classroom” as an environmental education center for the community’s youth and other residents. The center is about more than education, says project manager, Laurie Schoeman. It’s also a statement from and a cure for a neighborhood that has been left out of the “green” movement.

“A lot of the design is trying to capture an alternative response to what’s been happening in the community for over 50 years,” Schoeman says. Building Ecocenter at Heron’s Head Park was a 12-year, $1.4 million odyssey for LEJ that was completed only after Schoeman came in four years ago and changed the entire design team to get what was then a stalled project moving again.

Sustainable Industries first talked with Schoeman in 2008, right after she and her team secured a permit for the building’s living machine. We checked back in with her shortly after the Center’s completion in June 2010 to find out what’s next for her, the building and the community.

SI: Why did you get involved with this project and what have you learned from it?

LS: I’ve been training a long time for this project. I started off working in food security and … made connections that environmental hazards in these communities were creating challenges for these folks to move forward. So I moved from the food security movement into city planning [after] realizing that growing food for people in their communities would not solve the problem of poverty.

I’ve learned some really great lessons in how to form a design team. In a project like this, … you can’t just depend on your architect … the project manager has to be privy and understand all the pieces that come into play in something like this. It has to be a collaborative process, and that’s not an easy balance to create. Your architect is critical. They need to know HVAC. They need to understand how plumbing works.

SI: What is the function of the building? What will be going on there and who is coming to it?

LS: Literacy for Environmental Justice, which is the nonprofit developer of this building, trains youth to be environmental stewards. We work with thousands of youth each year in the park to teach around a variety of natural environment themes. [Now that the building is complete] we’re going a step further and will train youth in the built environment. So this living classroom will allow us to teach youth about solar power, wastewater treatment, low-impact development design solutions. We will be able to offer a built environment curriculum that will parlay well with state standards.

SI: Why put up such a green building in such a toxic location?

LS: We should be building all of our green buildings and ‘green’ systems in these communities that have felt the most impact. The green building movement has traditionally been located in communities that have the money to make those front-end investments in things like green roofs and solar panels and wind turbines. All too often, the most impacted and marginalized communities—urban core communities—get overlooked because they don’t have the financial resources to make those investments.

I think it’s the very people that are suffering under the years of poor planning that desperately need these systems put in place. Our building is regenerative. Regenerative within the context of Bayview-Hunters Point means a significant amount. This is a community that … has been cut off from the core central city by several different highways. There hasn’t been public transportation here for many years. This community is composed mostly of people of color, immigrants, African-American community members and a lot of low-income folks. So this is a community that has not only been displaced, but cut off from what we think San Francisco is.

We think about it as a regenerative effort because ... we want to see buildings here that actually add value to the community instead of detracting from the health of the community. All too often buildings in this community have created additional hardscape burden, have created shadows, have not been designed to create a commons, or have not been designed to create a healthy living environment. … So we’re trying to change the nature of the built environment here.

SI: Since the building is entirely off-grid and reliant on solar, what are you doing for power at night?

LS: We store all of our produced energy in a bank of deep-cycle batteries.

SI: Isn’t that more expensive and less environmentally benign than feeding into the grid?

LS: There’s a philosophical basis for why we decided to build a standalone solar array. Given the fact that PG&E (NYSE: PCG) has had a negative environmental impact around California in many communities like Bayview-Hunters Point, the design team, headed up by me, decided to go independent from that very system.... The second driver was that the building itself is located more than 900 linear feet from a grid tie-in connection point. … We would have had to step down a very high voltage industrial line ... and we would have had go to the expense of not only stepping down but running underground cables to the building [because] the park that we live in is in a bird-habitat zone.

When you look at the cost of tying in to the utility versus the cost of building the standalone system, within one year there’s a payoff. It’s actually more affordable for us to generate our own power onsite. Philosophically, what’s really important to consider is … we may feel we are running our lives off of clean, renewable energy by having solar panels.

When you feed back into the grid and net meter back, what you get as energy is not clean and renewable. The only way you can guarantee clean energy is having a system that uses the energy you produce.

SI: But feeding into the grid adds more clean energy to the overall portfolio and removes the need for individual battery arrays.

LS: …The power companies are now mandated have to have a certain amount of their power portfolio be renewable. What we’re doing by feeding into the grid is helping the energy company get to that compliance measure. … That’s a good thing because we’re pushing private power in the right direction. But for a lot of folks that feel that the power companies are not doing the right thing by communities like Bayview-Hunters Point, … that allows the power companies not to do their due diligence and build their own renewable arrays—and make the investments that they really do need to be making—on a grand scale. We’re sort of letting them off the hook, in a sense.

The battery question is really important to me because the issue of battery storage is an environmental problem. … Batteries are a single time investment in a stand-alone array. We’re not making a continued daily investment in non-renewable inputs. ...We’re looking at the lifecycle investment of a battery versus the ongoing impact of having non-renewable [power].

SI: What is next for you and the organization in terms of this building and other projects?

LS: We have a space now, the community has a space now, that will model best practices [and] will be something that will add value to the community from a variety of angles. And I think that the organization is going to be able to raise the bar in its own programming and raise its profile as an environmental justice advocacy group that is trying to push for clean communities throughout the community of Bayview-Hunters Point, throughout the region and maybe throughout the state. We’re part of an international network of environmental justice community groups.

I want to build another of these buildings and I‘d like to bring it to my hometown. I am thinking about ways of constructing something like this back on the East Coast and I am specifically interested in New York, where I am from. Can you imagine a building like this as part of the South Bronx?

From: ecohome Magazine

From: ECOHOME 2010 Posted on: August 11, 2010 5:06:00 PM

12 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Green Building Product

A green building product better begin as a good product. Here’s what to look for before diving deeper into a product’s green claims.
By:Rick Schwolsky

While the industry has made real progress in providing us with green products and backing up their performance claims, product selection will continue to be one of the most critical challenges you will face in meeting your green missions—and that puts your business and reputation at risk.

As a former high-performance home builder, I know what this feels like. You’re stuck in a gray area between innovation and risk, caught between a commitment to build high-performance homes and your responsibilities to ensure those homes still perform their most basic functions without creating problems—or liabilities.

“Nobody,” builders often say, “wants to be the first to try out a new product,” and yet we’re driven to embrace change and improve the way we build. This dilemma puts pressure on every decision you make, whether it’s detailing a wall section, specifying ventilation equipment, or selecting finishes.

You have to find a reliable level of confidence in your decisions and balance the trade-offs associated with them. But how can you gain the confidence you need?

Here are the first 12 questions you should ask about any green building product you’re evaluating—before you make your selection:

How will it perform its basic function as a building material or product?

How does it compare with products I use now?

Is it code approved?

Is it third-party certified?

Will it contribute toward project certification?

Is it available?

How will it affect my pricing?

Will it increase my level of risk or liability?

How will it improve the level of performance of my homes?

How will it contribute toward sustainability?

Will it require new sequencing or installation skills/trades?

Is it worth the investment for the benefits?

After answering these 12 questions, apply your own experience and expertise to filter out products that would put you outside your comfort zone in terms of unknowns and risks.

Only after evaluating potential selections for their application as viable building products can you focus on their green attributes and performance benefits and how they’ll integrate with the other elements of your green projects. At that point you can ask: “What makes these products green?” “How can I avoid greenwashing?” and “How can I verify the manufacturers’ performance claims?”

This last question leads to third-party certifications, which we regularly cover in EcoHome. For more on how to navigate product certifications, check out “Keeping Them Honest: Searching for Truth Behind Green Product Claims.”

From: The Grist

BY Jonathan Hiskes
16 AUG 2010 12:01 AM

First there was Walk Score, the web tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale.

Today the same developers release Transit Score, an app that ranks how well-served a location is by buses and rail lines. It measures how far you'd have to walk to a transit stop and how often trains and buses arrive (trains count for more) and assigns a separate 1-100 score.

New York City's Grand Central Station, for example, gets a perfect 100 (a "Rider's Paradise"). Transit Score so far serves 30 major U.S. cities that make their transit data available in a developer-friendly format.

It's one of three new features released today by Front Seat, a Seattle "civic software" company that works to promote walkable neighborhoods. The other two are equally intriguing.

The new commute reports feature side-by-side estimates of how long it takes to reach a destination by walking, biking, driving, or riding transit. It's similar to Google Maps, from which it draws data, although Walk Score's presentation makes it easier to compare options.

The commute reports also include a topographic map -- a very helpful feature if you're a cyclist in a hilly place like Seattle. Unless it discourages users from biking ...

Finally, Walk Score adds a home and transportation costs calculator to help people get a fuller picture of what it costs to live somewhere. It prompts users to enter their annual income, monthly housing costs, and monthly transportation spending (providing estimates if users don't know). Then it determines whether their housing situation is affordable, based on new measure of affordability that's making waves in housing policy circles.

The conventional -- and flawed -- rule of thumb for housing affordability is that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing costs. Walk Score uses a different standard that suggests households should spend no more than 45 percent of monthly income on housing and transportation costs.

The 45-percent guideline comes from the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in Chicago. It's a way of reminding people that when they choose a home, they're also choosing a location, and the transportation costs that go with it.

"We want to help customers look holistically at the total cost of choosing to live in a particular location," Walk Score CEO Josh Herst told me last week. "Transportation is often a hidden expense. We want to increase transparency for it."

Transportation costs may be tougher to track than housing, but they tend to follow a pattern: Households in traditional suburbs spend 24 percent of their income on transportation on average, according to CNT, while households in walkable urban areas spend only 16 percent.

I've been reporting on other innovative uses of the CNT's H+T Index, such as the Abogo web app. It's partnership with the popular Walk Score could give the index its biggest exposure yet.

Like Walk Score, Transit Score will be available as an API, a format that developers can integrate into other sites and apps. Ziprealty.com has already agreed to incorporate the tool. (Much of Walk Score's use comes through its iPhone app and through real estate sites such as Zillow.com that have added it.)

Herst said Transit Score will add more cities as they make their transit data available. His team is working on a separate set of improvements to Walk Score -- to make it stop assuming people will walk across lakes, rivers, and interstates, for example -- that is still in the works.

From: REALTOR Magazine

About 50 percent of mortgage professionals believe the industry will go paperless in the next three to four years, up from 28 percent in a similar 2008 survey by the National Mortgage News.

Xerox Mortgage Services Vice President Greg Smith said that the current high level of demand for compliance is slowing the transition. But as the market gains momentum, he believes, so will electronic processing.

About 69 percent of respondents said they were already seeing increasing use of electronic disclosures. Some 79 percent believe that pushing the envelop on this transition is important because it decreases turnaround and processing costs.

Source: National Mortgage News, Bonnie Sinnock (08/09/2010)