FRONT LINES: Fast Takes

Wireless to be a commercial must-have

“Five years from now, having buildingwide wireless in commercial office properties will be as essential for tenants as broadband is today,” Realcomm Managing Partner Darlene Pope told commercial practitioners at her company’s recent conference in Chicago. In a new survey, tenants rated Wi-Fi availability as the most important building amenity after food service because, among other things, it prevents lost cell phone signals inside building elevators and enhances tenants’ productivity and safety, said Pope.

Other benefits she pointed to: the ease with which tenants can add workers, since no additional cable is needed; telecom redundancy that enables businesses to keep operating if a hard-wired network is damaged; and easy installation of security cameras and energy saving devices such as motion sensors.
—Mariwyn Evans

Rental affordability worsens
Households must earn $16.31 an hour on average to rent the average two bedroom apartment, up from $15.78 in 2005, says the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The most expensive rental market is Stamford/Norwalk, Conn., requiring an average of $30.62 an hour. The next several priciest markets are in California, led by San Francisco, which requires $29.83 in hourly household earnings.
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Background check nixed
The Nevada real estate commission pulled a controversial proposal to require one time background checks and fingerprinting of practitioners licensed before September 2004. Practitioners licensed after that date are already subject to the requirement. The commission withdrew the proposal while regulators studied whether it has the authority to impose the requirement, something the Nevada Association of REALTORS® has called for. Meanwhile, the commission and NVAR have promised cooperation to work out implementation issues that have brokers worried. Among them is the potential for delays of up to several months in handing out licenses.

Zillow adds for-sale listings
One-year-old home valuation site Zillow.com has added for-sale listings to its mix of services. Real estate practitioners as well as unrepresented sellers are invited to market their listings on the site at no charge. The site had slightly fewer than 10,000 homes listed for sale in mid December.

Investor to buy Realogy
An affiliate of private equity fund Apollo Management L.P. is paying $9 billion to acquire Realogy Corp., the parent company of the Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, and Sotheby’s International Realty franchise operations and the country’s largest brokerage, NRT Inc. Realogy also owns a commercial brokerage operation as well as title and relocation companies.

Shareholders will earn $30 per share on the deal, which must be approved by the Realogy board at its spring meeting. Realogy was spun off as a separate, publicly traded company from Cendant Corp. in mid 2006 and under the deal will return to private hands. Apollo’s relationship with the company isn’t new; it held joint ownership of NRT with Cendant before the spin-off.

RM

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Apartment rental inflation