today Sam Zell (another billionaire) said essentially the same thing. Zell speaking with Bloomberg says the recovery will start at year end and gain strength in the middle of next. The concern I have is not the financial markets now, it is the relationship between the markets and the government. The unknown regulatory hurdles and expenses are what concern me going into the coming year.
Everyone is basing the real estate recovery on the general economic recovery, but we forget that the economy was driven by real estate growth and development between 2004 and 2006. So now we are back 7 years before the general economy was doing positive things.
Since that time we have added many more challenges from the government in the form of regulations and taxation which will hamper future economic recoveries. Add into that all of the soft landing programs that have kept us from hitting the bottom in residential real estate and it is hard to forecast accurately when the recovery will really start.
Zell made his fortune investing in real estate, and sold Chicago-based Equity Office Properties Trust to Blackstone Group LP in New York for $39 billion in 2007. He said in yesterday’s interview that the U.S. housing market will start recovering toward the end of 2010 and strengthen in the middle of 2011.
Now chairman of Equity Residential, the largest publicly traded U.S. apartment owner, Zell said real estate investment trusts will have enough cash to boost dividends in the future. Almost 70 percent of REITS tracked by Morningstar Inc. have cut or eliminated their payouts since the second quarter of 2008 as commercial real estate values plunged.
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