According to FayObserver.com A contractor will soon start demolishing two housing projects as part of the Hope VI revitalization near downtown Fayetteville. WECC Inc. of Fayetteville … More HERE

Techinical difficulties with our recording program has caused us to delay Episode 1 of our podcast.  We had planned on using Skype as a recording method, but Skype decided to go all screwy with us tonight.  My co-host and I talked over skype this past Tuesday and it worked fine, but when we try to talk tonight my voice doesn’t transmit to his speakers.  We checked and double checked all of the audio settings, and when we called each other on another voip program, Xfire, the call worked fine.  Skype just didn’t want to cooperate.  Another friend could hear both of us fine, and after restarting the computers, reinstalling skype, etc…, we still couldn’t reach the end of this madness.

New methods may have to be sought out, sorry for the delay.  I’m sure our expansive fan base is incredibly appalled at the news.

Last night after work I picked up Valve’s sequel to Left 4 Dead.  L4D2 came out this Tuesday, November 17th, and has since been rated consistently high on numerous gaming sites.  The game follows in its prequel’s foot steps by confronting a team of 4 player controlled characters with hordes upon hordes of bloodthirsty zombies.  Players must progress through several unique “Campaigns,” or levels, making their way from check point to check point while trying to stay alive.  It’s a pretty simple formula that plays out impressively well.

Thus far I have enjoyed my single player experience of the game, but trying to take Left 4 Dead 2 online is an entirely different story.  It appears that somewhere, somehow, due to some unforeseen circumstance(s), Valve’s L4D2 dedicated servers are having troubles.  What little research I have done on the subject seems to suggest that their system is networking players with servers that are no where near their location, and this malfunction has been unfortunately causing massive amounts of lag in L4D2’s multiplayer games.  The game even becomes unplayable when too many players are present.  I’m fine with waiting for the problem to get fixed, but don’t please don’t keep us waiting too long.

L4D2 isn’t exactly the definition of a PGN supported title, but it’s a great value nonetheless, in terms of what you receive for your cash.  The game features an approximately five hour long single player experience, with each one hour segment replayable in several unique multiplayer modes.  If you like zombies and multiplayer titles, it’s a must buy.

Left 4 Dead 2 will be covered in this week’s episode of the PGN Podcast.

Just picked up an older game today from my FLGS (Friendly Local Game Shop).  It’s an older game that has kinda been picked up and redistributed by Fantasy Flight games under their “Silver Line” series.  First published in 1987, Chaos Marauders was very well received in its first edition, and although it’s popularity has obviously subsided, I’ve taken some enjoyment in playing my new copy.  The game packs one hell of a punch at $24.95.

Despite its age, Chaos Marauders will be reviewed on the first episode of the PGN Podcast.  Tune in Saturday evening for the full review and more.

It may not be the most active real estate market right now, but there are developers looking ahead, planning for the future when the market does come back. C&C Capital, a Guadalajara-based real estate development company, has announced two large mega-development projects for 2010, Nahui and Punta Raza, with sales commencing in December and January.

The first is Nahui, a 2,100-acre development situated west of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, in between Real del Mar/Arena Blanca and the beach of Destiladeras heading west towards Punta de Mita. The property has over 4.5 km of oceanfront and more than 243 meters of elevation change. The highway to Punta Mita, at least the stretch from La Cruz to the hotel Paladium will ultimately be relocated behind this property, freeing up valuable coastal property. The new access point will be on the easterly side of the new development of Alamar in La Cruz.

Phase I of Nahui will include sites for timeshare development called Tau Nahui resort, an anchor hotel, and for a collection of small boutique hotels and residential product options built onto the hillside behind overlooking the bay. Both Tau Nahui and the boutique hotel components will provide an ongoing stream of leads for real estate available on the hillside behind. The idea and hope of the developer is that Nahui will evolve into a west-coast version of Playa del Carmen, (a very successful and popular resort town near Cancun), however with more thoughtful, planned development.

A pedestrian pueblo (the Village) at the property’s western edge facing the beach will provide a publicly accessible retail dining and entertainment center and plaza, and will be the village hub not just for Nahui but for the region.

Phase II, or Club Nahui, will be situated on the eastern most section (next to Arena Blanca/Real del Mar) of Nahui that will include a gated ocean- and golf-oriented property overlooking the Pacific, anchored by a 100-room hotel, planned to be operated by the 6-star Capella Hotels and Resorts company with 120 branded residences. The product will include seaside estates, 3- and 4-bedroom hillside villas, stacked flats with penthouses and custom residential estates, all sharing views to the ocean. 400 to 450 residential units will eventually encompass the complete project.

The hotel and the residential units will be built around a Rees Jones-designed signature golf course, and will have a beach club, tennis center, golf clubhouse, an Auriga spa. The 18-hole golf club and clubhouse will be open to public play with preferential times reserved for residents and guests.

Nahui North is the third phase of the development, positioned above the existing highway and up into the hills behind. The site is being planned for large ranch-sized lots and is envisioned as an eco-community, designed to ensure preservation at this partially segregated corner of Nahui.

The other project of C&C Capital is Punta Raza, and it is situated just south of Guayabitos, about an hour north from Vallarta’s airport. A new four-lane road is scheduled to be bid out in 2010 which would  shorten travel time to and from Puerto Vallarta, but let’s see when that actually takes place. For now though, it isn’t actually that far away.

Punta Raza encompasses 293 hectares with 2.75 kilometers of beach in a single strip and 3.24 kilometers of rocky ocean frontage dotted with pocket beaches and private coves. This really is a spectacular piece of property. I remember flying over it about ten years ago and thinking, it was a developer’s dream with its beachfront, hillsides behind and area large enough for a golf course. The development will feature up to seven luxury hotels, anchored by a 400-room Grand Hyatt Hotel and a 200-room Park Hyatt hotel with 60 Park Hyatt residences. Tau Punta Raza, a timeshare operation, will be the first to open. The site will eventually accommodate up to 1,000 oceanfront and ocean-view single family detached home sites and condominium units, and will feature a private residents-only club. A deep water, 250-slip marina and adjacent village and commercial area is also planned.

Both are very ambitious projects, especially with the market the way it currently is. However, the developer seems to understand this and is launching both projects in phases, all phases to be independent, making build-out much easier. It is understood as well that price points for real estate are going to be very competitive, especially during the early phases of this launch. I think that’s a smart move in this market, you have to do all you can to get people to buy, especially pre-sale!

Yesterday I added the sources of our CMIS and WebDAV adapters to our main repository on svn.flexive.org. They are still under development, so no binary releases yet, but especially the WebDAV adapter is already quite useable. If you want to build them now, please follow these steps…

Get and build Chemistry

Chemistry is an incubating project at Apache and provides a generic implementation of a server-side CMIS connector. The idea is that the content repository only has to implement a modest set of backend methods, and Chemistry will provide the rest (like AtomPub and WebService bindings). Currently there are no releases of Chemistry yet, so we need to build it on our own (all instructions are for Unix, please adopt slightly when using Windows):

mkdir build
cd build
svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/chemistry/branches/0.62 chemistry-reactor
cd chemistry-reactor
mvn install
cd chemistry
mvn install

Get the CMIS/WebDAV modules

The CMIS and WebDAV modules of [fleXive] are also built with Maven 2. To build them, we don’t need the entire [fleXive] source tree, as the [fleXive] artifacts will be resolved from our Maven repository.

cd ../..
svn checkout http://svn.flexive.org/repository/flexive/trunk/modules/chemistry flexive-chemistry
cd flexive-chemistry
mvn install

The “mvn install” step will also run some tests with an embedded [fleXive] container, if you want to skip them pass “-DskipTests” on the command line.

Installation

The interesting artifacts produced by the build are two web applications:

• flexive-webdav-webapp/target/flexive-webdav.war contains the WebDAV adapter
• flexive-atompub-webapp/target/flexive-atompub.war is the CMIS AtomPub connector

To use them, add the WAR files to your flexive.ear (when using Maven, add a dependency to the WAR artifact, when using the flexive distribution, add them to the flexive-dist/applications directory, when building [fleXive] from source put them in the drop/ directory). Note that both adapters are under active development, and are not yet in a stable state. The CMIS adapter used to work against the CMIS Spaces and CMIS Explorer clients, but the clients have moved to newer versions of the standard since then. The WebDAV adapter is based on Milton and works quite well, although it’s also not recommended for production use. I tested it with KDE’s Dolphin, Gnome Nautilus (only works when it is bound to the root web context), cadaver (Linux command line client), and Windows XP. It also passes quite a few tests of the litmus WebDAV test suite, which of course is entirely to be attributed to the excellent Milton WebDAV library.

Terrace Holdings is making things happen

1.  Two new tenants (Intec Solutions and The Kidz Club) are schedule to open their doors at Erlanger City Center office complex by the end of the year.

2.  Erlanger City Center and the City of Erlanger have team up to build a  monument sign that will be used as the entrance to the City, to display City of Erlanger messages on the digital signage board and the monument incorporates all the tenants of the office complex at Erlanger City Center.

3.  Two new commercial tenants (The Wine List and Re/Max) are in for their permits to start  tenant build out at our West Chester, OH mini lifestyle center known as “The Point”.

4.  MI Homes continues to close on additional lots at our Claiborne subdivision in independence, KY and

5.  Drees Homes has a customer under contract to build a house at our Saylor Woods community located in Independence, KY

For more information about Terrace Holdings, please visit us at www.terraceholdings.com

Every year the following symposium takes place in Mexico City. I’ve attended and found it very rewarding, educational and a great way to network. This year should be especially interesting with all that is going on in the real estate industry. I highly recommend it.

Luxury Markets Symposium – Mexico, October 6th and 7th, Mexico City

Luxury Markets Symposium is the forum to learn about the current state of the luxury leisure real estate industry. The results, the changes we face and the newest trends which will drive our future. Luxury Markets Symposium is a unique forum in Latin America in which you can hear from international speakers, learn from their experience and discuss the options for growth and development for the industry.

Some of the opportunities to be discussed this year are:
• Mixed-use projects
• The Mega development experience
• Active Living (new and attractive wellness and lifestyle options for retirees).
• Marketing 360°. Communication and product positioning.
• Potential growth in the luxury segment of the leisure-oriented real-estate industry.

Widen your networking opportunities and generate growth for your business.

Luxury Markets Symposium will take place at: Club de Banqueros in Mexico City www.luxurymarketsymposium.com

Call them to register: +52 (55) 5005 6345 México City,
or email at registro@luxurymarketsymposium.com

I don’t usually get into talking about individual developments and what they have to offer, but it was brought up a few posts ago that Grupo Real del Mar had a new program that was allowing people to get into a new condo for a fraction of the cost by buying in together. I was recently forward the information regarding the program by the developer and here it is.

I received some more information about the “partnership” program that Real del Mar is currently offering. This was taken from a forwarded presentation:

¿What does it mean, buying a property in Partnership?

It means that two or more people get together to buy a property. They distribute the obligations and rights that correspond to each of the partner in accordance of the percentage of the property invested.

The Proposal is usually for four investors with each of them a 25% owner of the condominium.

How are the expenses and income shared?

The expenses and income are divided in accordance of the percentage of the investment of each partner.

For Example; if there are four partners and the expenses of furnishing and deed were a total of $ 40,000 usd, each partner have to pay $10,000 usd. In the same way any monthly fees and operation costs would be divided.

What happens if you want to sell your condo?

The property can be sold completely to a new buyer, each partner getting the percentage they invest. Or each partner can sell its percentage.

How you divide the use of the property ?

When there are 4 partners, each one has the right to use the condo 12 weeks a year, leaving 4 weeks free or for maintenance. Entering on Mondays and Leaving on Sundays. There would be four weeks of high season, rotated every year. There are: Holy week, Easter week, Christmas and New Years.

Can I rent to somebody else the weeks that correspond to me?

Yes, you can rent, to your friends and family or through a In-house Rental Program.

Prices ranges from $230,000 to $250,000 USD for the condominium, which is then split for ways. 25% is due a a down payment with the remainder at closing. This allows four investors to get a three-month fractional ownership for around $50,000 each. Not a bad price.

The project is La Jolla, in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle a Grupo Real del Mar project. You can get more information about it at ventas@gruporealdelmar.com.

The 0.6 version of our EAR archetype includes a hardcoded version number for the H2 database engine artifact. Recent changes in the [fleXive] trunk (i.e. 3.1-SNAPSHOT) require a newer version of H2, otherwise the initialization of the database will fail with a “Syntax error in SQL statement”.

The fix for existing projects is to fix the version number in your main module’s pom.xml: increase the h2.version property from 1.1.106 to 1.1.117.

To avoid this issue in the future, I moved the H2 dependency to the flexive-h2 artifact. The current snapshot version of the archetype (1.0-SNAPSHOT) therefore no longer includes a dependency on com.h2database.h2, and potential changes in the required H2 version number (always a possibility since H2 development is very active) won’t affect existing projects.

Tim Kelley, Director of the Mortgage Alliance Program (MAP for Stewart Title Latin America, dropped by our office in Vallarta to present a new program Stewart Title is currently introducing to help promote second home purchasing in Mexico. This has probably been the worst year for Mexico regarding negative PR, primarily because of the drug cartel wars and the swine flu. Tim has been traveling the country, talking to real estate developers and associations, to have them all contribute to a non-profit fund that will provide a marketing and public relations campaign on behalf of Mexico, primarily for the American market. He has managed to enthusiastically bring on board many of Mexico’s largest developers, who are contributing because they realize this is something that effects everyone of them and they can do more working together on this rather than individually. Kelley has also managed to get the government involved as well, who hopefully understand the benefits of real estate tourism and what positive benefits it brings to the country. More on this as I receive information.

This is going to be quick, since I only have about three hours. But theres nothing on TV, and I have a bit of time. So I might as well try to create a game!

Probably not as good as last time, probably not as many updates, and its probably going to fail a lot quicker. We will see!

7 PM - Man, is this late already. And I haven’t even really started! So I just spent about half an hour or so and played around with several ideas I had. I thought, why not try to turn one of those into something playable? So I’m now trying to do this. So far, there is some kind of camera-movement which so far works really nice. And… thats it. Next up: Drag and Drop! Wish me luck.

7.50 PM - It took me this long to add Drag&Drop? Wow. This shows me how much I suck. Also: My computer freezed completely: once. Thats impressive and annoying! Also, kind of scary.

In other news, I’m getting hungry. I should eat something! If I don’t make it today – and I won’t – I might continue on this on wednesday or thursday or something. Far away.

8.40 PM – I ate something and thought about that one problem. Terribly interesting for you guys, I bet.

9 PM – Current bug: Somehow, the neighbours of the cubes aren’t correctly determined. This isn’t really telling you much since I didn’t say anything about this game so far, but you must admit “Neighbours of the cubes” would be a pretty neat name for a band!

9.20 PM - So now that works, but now the triggering of “please-search-for-your-neighbours” doesn’t work. Also, “Please search for your neighbours” is kind of a sucky name for a band.

————–

FAILURE - No more time today. Will probably continue on this later this week. Stay tuned!

CONTINUE?

3 PM - It’s late again. Well, let’s see how this goes. So heres a bit about the game:

The player gets a few cubes – its always cubes with me, huh? – arranged in a neat fashion. His (or her) job is to drag&drop the cubes in order to reconstruct the whole thing so that it fulfills certain conditions.

However, the connection needs to stay connected at all times. So you can’t just drag that one element out which would disconnect that whole thing. So I have to check if the cube the player desires to remove is actually one that might disconnect the whole thing. This is harder than I thought it would be. Huh. Well, I have a new approach to this on paper, and I’m now going to try to implement this. Since I love you, I’m going to tell you a secret: I’m kind of scared to implement this.

3.30 PM – Case in point: I spent way too much time making that drag&drop-movement smooth, when I should have spent that time doing that stupid neighbour stuff. Okay, no more excuses! I’m gonna work on that now!

… Or maybe I should get myself something to drink first.

4.30 PM – Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. Keeps crashing. Bugs. Crash. Bug. Error. Bug. Crash. Does this make you happy? This is my “hobby”. God.

5 PM - I think it works!

Wait… is it pathetic that it took so long?

5.15 PM – I told the forum about this. I shouldN’t have done that. Where can I delete posts?

5.20 PM - So basically, I did that because it forces me to continue working on this. Man, clever, huh? But since people might be interested in the actual development, okay: I’m not having a design document – as per usual for these minigames – and the rough gameplaysketch is still permanently changing in my head. The basic gameplay is pretty much decided, but the style is changing rapidly, and there is also that voice in my head which puts the whole thing more into rhythm-game-territory. Which might be fun, but its a lot harder to prototype and do for me since I’m not able to do these things. Aww well!

5.30 PM - Urgh. I should be more careful naming my variables next time. So I can do “X”, when the variable named “fail” (a theme that describes this whole experiment) is “one”, which in my mind means “true”, so basically this reads as “if it failed, it worked”, which makes my head hurt

I could have renamed that variable instead of whining about it here, but you know… this is more fun.

6.30 PM - After a not-very-constructive little “break”, which will now continue (it began already), there will/might/should/could be more! So far, I’ve only outlined a bit of the interface.

This time, I want to use no tutorials. Everything should be explained in the game: So expect bubbles to pop up (without interfering, obviously), these kind of things.

8 PM - Yeah, I took a break. Anyway, the “tutorial” is now a giant text floating around telling you how to do stuff. But its really just one sentence that reacts to your input, so its not like my usual long-winded tutorial texts. And its just the very basic controls, everything else should work without these long texts.

8.30 PM - Current interest in this is zero. I can basically write what I want!

9.30 PM - The best thing I ever programmed was a confetti-effect. I use it all the time. If you haven’t programmed your own yet, you should do so right now, since you can use it in any situation always and it will always be great.

9.45 PM - Will now add another gameplay element. After that: Creating a real endless mode, adding a score and then, there will be reviews. Previews. Playtests. And all that.

10 PM - I’ve used so much stuff from Cubic Colors, it’s not funny. And some of the material from Projection. And a few graphics from older prototypes not released, etc. etc. This is insane.

10.30 PM - Another bug. This time, a barrier doesn’t rotate correctly. Hmm..

11.20 PM - Enough for today. A somewhat playable version is done and will be sent to T for comments. I’m going to sleep.

Let’s start with a picture!

3.20 PM - So here is a shot of the current status. You can drag&drop the cubes and stack the cubes wherever you want in any direction. Your task is it to reach the goals, which are the colorful… shapes floating around. Since it can be difficult to judge the exact position of such an object, I’ve just added this handy line you see above. This makes building stuff a lot easier, and is an absolute must since there will be a timelimit.

5 PM – Whoops, forgot to update. So whats new? That line effect shown above has improved and can now be seen with mouse overs ALL THE TIME. This makes planning a little easier. I fixed a lot of bugs, all of them mainly involving more cubes than in the shot above. However, even larger structures with lots of cubes are now no problem anymore.

In order to be able to play with these, the camera needs to dynamically adjust – which it does now. It moves dynamically and automatically in such a way that you can always see everything. Neato!

5.45 PM - 45 Minutes mostly spent polishing and bugfixing. Among all this, I managed to make the game a lot harder – and fun – by … well, I guess by being an asshole. See, there are certain “lines” that forbid you to place cubes. These will now always be placed so that you have to reconsider. A lot. Mwahaha!

6 PM - And now its too hard :/ Balancing is FUN

See the red lines? You have to remove all cubes along that line. Approximately one million billion in this picture.

6.50 PM - I’ll call it a day for now. Still not finished, so I removed that “Short Edition”-thing. Why is this taking so long? Mainly because I still do other stuff (no Gamedesign? Thats POSSIBLE!?) on the side, and also because this isn’t really prototyping – I’m doing way too much polishing for that. Will now end work on this for today. Thanks for reading, see ‘ya … tomorrow, I guess?

—

4.20 PM – And here we go again! Bugfixing is the name of the game, and I already did that quite a lot! Also: The game is now fun enough that playtesting sessions take a lot longer than they should.

There is still that odd bug every now and then, but they are hard to reproduce. Hmm…

4.40 PM - Finally, I’m going to add the “Round”-structure that the whole game – basically – already supports. But we need to show that to the player, no?

5.30 PM - So now, for some reason, some objects aren’t checked correctly: Some of the lines above (the red things) don’t register if you put something in their way. I think I know what causes this, and the best thing: Said bug will be completely irrelevant, since I change how these lines work, anyway! Hahaha! BEST BUG FIX EVER

6.30 PM - It’s fun to have huge text on the screen, right? At least if it says things like “OH MY GOD ARE YOU AWESOME” and “OH MAN I WISH I WAS YOU”.

… Or, uh, “ROUND FAILED”?

Enough for today!

RANDOM NOTES

I doubt I’m going to use the timestamp anymore. So enjoy random notes and thoughts during the process of gamedevelopment!

—

I’m wondering if “FAILURE” or “FAILED” sounds better, and I am also wondering if maybe thats too harsh? But then, in games you can really have the two extremes between amazing victories (“GREAT JOB!”, “FANTASTIC!”, “EXCELLENT!”) and horrific failures (“FAILED!”, “HORRIBLE”, etc) and it just works. So let’s see how this goes..

In a move to raise buyer interest, DINE, developer of Punta Mita, is now offering attractive, below market financing rates at the Kupuri beachfront development. Kupuri is part of Punta Mita’s nine-and-a-half-mile beachfront, where DINE is offering lots ranging from ¾ acres to 1.5 acres, priced from $2.25 million for secluded hillside locations to $7.2 million for beachfront estate sites. 

To date, DINE has sold eight Kupuri lots, including a beachfront property to homebuyer and Mexico City-based architect Alejandro Quintanilla.  Quintanilla has designed a five-bedroom, contemporary style estate home with special guest quarters now under construction and slated for completion by fall of 2009.  

DINE’s new financing program requires a 30 percent down payment due at closing with no mortgage payment due for three years at zero percent interest. A balloon 70 percent payment balance is due at the end of three years. Additional terms and incentives, for a limited time, include a 15 percent discount off the list price, and a 10 percent discount as long as the home is built within the first three years. In addition, homeowner association fees, property taxes and golf membership dues are waived for three years.

Every Summer we feature a special Vallarta real estate issue in Vallarta Lifestyles. Below is the introduction that will be included. I’ll be posting the “Trends” as I seem them through the week.

How things can change in a short period of time. Vallarta’s real estate market has been hit on many sides this past year, making it difficult for the market to move ahead. Issues such as the global economic crisis or the swine flu scare are not actually “trends” in that they have, or are becoming long-term new directions in our marketplace, however, they are certainly facilitating new trends that for the most part, are new to this market.

It all began with the crisis that started in the USA and soon spread out to effect most of the world’s economies. It came late to Mexico, but when it did, especially in October of last year, the results were obvious and very apparent. It was like the tap had been turned off, especially for new product developers. After a slow summer, and hoping for better as the high season was approaching, well, it just didn’t happen. Sales were extremely slow as people battled with uncertainty of just how deep and severe the downturn would be.

In the Fall there was even discussions of a US economic depression, things were looking so bad. But that’s not talked about now. Now its more about “green shoots”, “V” or “W” or “L” shaped recoveries – the forecast now seems to be that, for the most part, the worst has been averted and now its just a matter of time – on how and when the market recovers.

From October until April there was a definite trend I’ll refer to as Risk vs. Uncertainty – a term I picked up from economist Frank Knight in an article featured in the New Yorker. People are used to dealing with risk. They face it in business situations, when they are considering what they should be doing with their investments. Its a part of life, with some people able to handle large risks better than others. Here is how Frank put it:

“Risk describes a situation where you have a sense of the range and likelihood of possible outcomes. Uncertainty describes a situation where it’s not even clear what might happen, let alone how likely the possible outcomes are. Uncertainty is always a part of business, but in a recession it dominates everything else: no one’s sure how long the downturn will last, how (shoppers) buyers will react, whether we’ll go back to the way things were before or see permanent changes in consumer behavior.”

Before we can expect any significant change in our current market the level of uncertainty must diminish. Unfortunately we seem to be living more and more in a world of uncertainty. Perhaps just getting used to living with it will be enough to reduce uncertainty and get the market back on track. And lately, either this is happening, or uncertainty has been reduced. It is at least a lot less than it was six months ago.

What has certainly been interesting is the mainstream media’s take on problems and issues faced in Mexico, primarily with regards to the swine flu scare and the “narco traficos”. Although both are/were serious issues, neither has really effected this region in any serious manner. There were very flew cases of the flu, but its impact managed to practically empty every hotel room in the region. Mexico’s response was a strong one, and praised around the world by major health organizations. The cost to the country, however, was severe as tourism is its 3rd largest industry. The drug wars between the drug cartels and with the army is also serious, but again, has not effected this region. No tourist or American/Canadian homeowner has in any way been effected by this. But the way both of these issues have been portrayed in the American media, has had very serious results. I hope this does not become a “trend”, which in some ways can be seen as Mexico-bashing. But as quickly as it can start, it can disappear. As soon as the elections ended in Iran and their problems started, Mexico was off the front page of mainstream media. Again, not to say these are not issues, but they certainly were and have been overblown. With that said, let’s take a look at what have been some of the trends that seem to be happening in Vallarta’s and the overall Mexican real estate market.

I’ve been working on my annual Real Estate Trends article for the next issue of Vallarta Lifestyles when I received the email alert about the Loreto Bay project. This was a very large project in Loreto that obtained a lot of coverage and from what I understand, sold a good number of homes. Wonder what’s happening to them? If anyone knows, please comment.

TSD Loreto Partners, S. en C. por A. de C.V. (the “Company”) regrets to inform its clients and stakeholders that, due to the challenging situation in the international real estate and financial markets, all operating and construction activities for Loreto Bay (the “Project”) will be suspended. 

To assist in securing new equity funding and a long-term suitable buyer for the Project the Company hired Cushman & Wakefield. Several potential buyers and investors have visited the Project over the last few months, yet in the context of the current economic crisis and credit shortage, the Project has been unable to secure a buyer or new investor.  

We regret to inform you that until new funds are secured, as of June 7th, 2009 all hospitality related operations will be suspended and as of June 8th, 2009 all construction related activities will be suspended. 

Please note that all homeowners with a home under construction, and all other homeowners will receive further information as it becomes available. More information about this can be found here and here.

Which helped me with Vallarta Real Estate Trend #8: Market Convergence

When demand was at its peak, for secondary housing or real estate tourism in a warm-climate location, it brought into the market locations that would most likely not be seen as potential candidates for prospective purchasers. Developments were being announced in places such as Nicaragua and Honduras. Panama, Costa Rica and Argentina became “hot” markets. Within Mexico, Loreto, which for years had remained a stagnant market, all of a sudden had multiple developments, one with more than 6,000 homesites. Well, as we’ve seen in our local market, the buyers (those that are still out there!) are looking for something closer to the center of activity of the community. In the same way, we see people will be looking for something that closer proximity to their primary home, easier to reach, and with a large community (consisting primarily of other second-homeowners) they can actively participate within. This is good for Mexico, and for the traditional real estate tourism markets such as Puerto Vallarta. Its not so good for Honduras and Nicaragua, even the the Loreto’s out there. That 2,000 home development, the Loreto Bay Company, that shut down operations this.

The following article by local Mexican attorney David Connell of Connell & Associates outlines well potential pitfalls but also the benefits that come with buying pre-sale real estate. With the current state of the world economy, there are more reasons to be concerned about pre-sale purchasing of real estate. Some markets have been relatively unscathed, while others have seen serious problems arise, areas such as in Las Vegas and Florida. What  really hurt these markets is the amount of credit availability, for both developers and purchasers, as well as “flipper” who never intends to live in the units purchased but just wants to make some money off of the developer’s initial low pricing. This is all fine in a healthy, up-swinging economy, but when it starts turning down, well, the results are all over the news.

A “pre-sale” purchase exists when a buyer enters into an agreement with a developer to purchase a unit that has not yet been built or finished. Inherently this type of purchase is risky. In Mexico over the last 10 years the real estate market has seen a major boom, especially in developed or developing costal areas. Between 1995 and 2005 prices skyrocketed and fueled an increased number of new projects, the majority of which were sold as “pre-sales”. The first of these projects brought great returns to the buyers, who often times purchased at a 30% discount off the finished sales price. Furthermore, many of these projects went up in value 20 or 30% per year prior to being delivered, which made the investment even more profitable. 

When the real estate boom started many investors thought long and hard about the terms of the pre-sale agreement before signing. Many did not sign these agreements as they presented too much risk and were too favorable for the developer. In short there was no guarantee a developer would finish a project or return the buyers’ funds if they could not deliver. 

However, as the boom gained speed, people were more willing to accept a less protective agreement in order to secure deals and get in on the “great investment opportunity”. As the real estate boom continued, fewer and fewer people were concerned about the terms of the agreements they were signing and more were concerned about getting an agreement signed so they would not lose the unit to another buyer.  

The recent down turn in the world economy and the rollercoaster stock market have seriously changed the outlook of every single buyer that I have spoken with that currently has a signed agreement with a pre-sale project that has not been delivered yet. Just about every buyer that I speak with today who has bought in a pre-sale project that is not finished is asking me “Is the developer going to finish the project”, “Can I get my money back” and “How can I protect myself if the project fails”. This article will go over where the pre-sale market is today, the risks and what you can do to limit those risks.

First and foremost, everyone must understand and have in mind that developers, more than anyone else, want to finish their projects and deliver the units. An unfinished, undelivered project means losses and no developer is in the business to lose money. In most cases developers are the ones that have put up the initial millions of dollars in seed money to get the project going. Do “pre-sale” developers use your money to finance the projects? The answer is “yes” they do use pre-sale money to finance or leverage their projects. However everyone must also understand that in most cases they have put up hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions to get the project going. 

This article will look at:  1) the general types of “pre-sale” projects that exist, 2) what you should negotiate for, and 3) What if the developer is gone and no one is on the project. 

Types of “Pre-sale” projects

There are principally two types of “pre-sale” projects. Please understand that there are many variations of the two principal types, but they all seem to fall into one of the two following classes: 

Class One.- Financed Pre-Sale Projects. – These projects are financed by Banks or Private Equity Groups who fund the project “based on sales projections being met”. As a very general example, a developer will put up 20% of the initial funds to get the project moving, then, as certain numbers of sales are met, the Bank or Private Equity Group will release funds to the project to move it forward. Based on an “absorption rate” (in general a speculative number of sales per month or quarter), the lender will release more funds to advance the project along. Obviously the “first round” of financing is usually the most difficult to get as the bank wants to see a “healthy” absorption of the product into the market. If they can see that 30% of total sales are reached, they are usually willing to release that really important first round of financing to get the project off the ground. 

If you pick up a real estate magazine from a year ago you will see several advertised projects that no longer exist. Why? Because they did not get enough “absorption sales” to kick off their first round of financing. 

Most of these Financed Pre-Sale Projects are the bigger more well known outfits. These outfits are usually better prepared to deal with problems in the market but they are not completely immune to sharp down turns in the number of sales. So where do the risks lie in these projects? Principally they lie in the developer making initial sales projections to get first round of financing approved but then not making further bench mark “absorption sales” to get the second and third round of financing. Recently some developments are experiencing very low sales numbers and what is worse, they are having clients default on existing agreements, lowering their number of sales to below the minimum required for financing to be in place. If this happens the developers usually opt to do all or some of the following: 

Ask for advanced or final payments. Most pre-sale agreements are very one-sided in favor of the developer and contain language that allows the developer to ask for final payment before delivering the product. 

Slow the construction down to the bare minimum. This is to cut costs until cash flow increases or sales number are met, triggering the next round of financing.

Extend financing terms and sometimes pass them on to the buyers. 

All of these options mean that you are going to be asked to pay more for your unit or it is going to be delivered later. The developer is looking at the economics of the project. You also need to be looking at this.

If you have bought in this type of a pre-sale project and see the developer slowing down on construction or proposing any of the options above, you need to move as quickly as possible to renegotiate or force a settlement on your agreement. The first people to negotiate or force a deal will usually get a better deal than those who wait. 

Class Two - Non-financed “Pre-sale” projects. These are the projects that do not have any type of formal financing and are speculating on making enough sales to generate cash flow for construction costs. These are usually smaller projects. 

Needless to say, these types of project are higher risk projects because when the sales stop, so does the project. If the sales stop for any length of time, these projects are more susceptible to legal action and to having the developer “disappear”. Once the developer disappears, everyone loses. 

Furthermore, since a financial institution or bank is not involved, there is usually no “contingency” or risk plan established in case the project fails. When a bank loans money to a project, they almost always include provisions to take over the project in the case of failure as well as a plan to inject the necessary capital to finalize the project. Smaller, self financed projects do not have these contingency plans. 

In these smaller types of “Pre-sale” projects, if sales are not met usually one of two things happens: 

Construction comes to a virtual stop. Maybe a hand full of workers is kept on to maintain the appearance of progress, but for all intents and purposes the project is stopped. 

The developer asks for advance payment or increases the price of the units. 

Smaller projects are more susceptible to going under. It is extremely important to be aware of this and, if any of the warning signs mentioned above appear, to take immediate action to protect your investment. Action, in this case, would mean getting a written and notarized agreement from the developer as well as full disclosure on the finances of the project. Legal action may also be needed. Verbal agreements or promises mean absolutely nothing unless the person making them is willing to sign off on them. 

WHAT SHOULD YOU NEGOTIATE FOR?

If you can, you need to turn the emotions complete off and the math skills on. There are a whole range of questions that need to be answered in order to make the correct mathematical economic solution that is best for you. Some of the general questions we go over with our clients are: 

1.- What is the developer offering? Any offer the developer is giving is a starting point. You need to build your arguments around this starting point. 

2.- What percentage of the total price have you paid? This is the liability of the developer as well as your exposure.

3.- What are you willing to lose? This is a hard question but you have to understand that if you are not flexible, your ability to reach a negotiated resolution is not good and litigation is expensive. 

4.- What legal options do you have and what are they going to cost? There are legal options besides litigation which can force a developer to come to a more reasonable solution. All of these options need to be explored. 

5.- How much more would you be willing to pay to have a finished unit vs. litigation? 

6.- Is there a group that has a professional common representative? The developer wants to resolve as many problems as he can. Groups of buyers will get priority attention over individual owners. 

We must understand that a developer is in an economic bind if he is slowing down or stopping the project. His options are limited and he will do whatever he needs to in order to make the project not fail and/or be subject to a law suit. The developer is not your friend nor is he your enemy. You are both investors in a project that is in trouble due to a world economic crisis. Finding or forcing a solution is better for both parties so you need to work with the developer or force him to work with you. 

WHAT IF THE DEVELOPER IS GONE AND NO ONE IS ON THE PROJECT?

This is the worst case scenario and you need to do some immediate research on what happened and see if there are any groups working to negotiate, find the developer or file action against the developer. Do not walk away from your investment. Even if you only recuperate 30% of what you invested, it is better than walking away and allowing someone else to take all of your investment. Get good advice, talk to other people in the development, review your options and get moving to protect your investment. 

This article was written by attorney David W. Connell. More articles and seminars by Mr. Connell can be seen at  www.mexicolaw.com.mx. The present article is property of Connell & Associates and its reproduction of use requires the express written authorization of Mr. Connell, who reserve all right over this work. Copyright 2008. 

Photo by flickr user sevensixfive

Pick a noun beginning with the prefix ‘re-’ and someone has applied it to the New East Side Community project. Now East Baltimore Development, Inc. (EBDI) has approved the acquisition of 800 to 900 properties in addition to the land already allocated for the undertaking, which is located near the Johns Hopkins Medical College.

EBDI’s president and CEO Jack Shannon resigned in April, but the nonprofit is plowing ahead under the direction of interim chief Christopher Shea, with the cooperation of the city government and charities including the Annie E. Casey and Morris Goldseker Foundations.

The redevelopment (there’s one ‘re’) has been underway for over six years and has already displaced at least 400 East Side households. The new acquisition will likely displace as many again. EBDI says its aim down the road is to help former residents move back into new or rehabilitated homes in the neighborhood at little to no net cost. The ultimate, 88-acre goal (perhaps deferred by a recent $50 million budget cut) is the construction and operation of a spanking new K-8 public school, a state-of-the-art science and technology research park, new graduate housing for Johns Hopkins, a new hotel at the corner of East Eager and North Wolfe Streets, and 80,000 square feet of retail space that will hopefully draw fresh business to the area.

Shea and others are optimistic about additional plans for an East Side MARC Train Station, but this possibility remains, for the moment, simply a species of optimism.

What have you heard about the future of East Baltimore?

Photo by danielle_blue

Diamonds may be a struggling commercial district’s best friend. Samuelson’s Diamonds Downtown (426 W. Baltimore St.), a Baltimore institution for almost ninety years, has been very busy lately. In addition to relocating and renovating its own store, the family-owned company has invested in several properties on the 400 block of West Baltimore Street, a once-hot shopping spot that’s fallen into decline.

Their six-story development will include a sparkling, technologically enthusiastic Samuelson’s as well as 130,000 square feet of mixed use office, retail, and restaurant space on both sides of the street between Eutaw and Paca from 407 to 425 West Baltimore. The property is being managed by David S. Brown and is currently under construction.

Ron Samuelson, the scion of the diamond dynasty, promises a PNC Bank, a Five Guys, and a Panera. Reputed to be somewhat excitable, but endearing, Mr. Samuelson also promises to play the video of your favorite song when you come visit the new store, which the family hopes to open later this year.

It may be a little sad to see yet another slice of Baltimore become commercially homogenized, as in any other American city, but it beats the alternative of row upon row of condemned buildings.

What’s your call on the redevelopment of West Baltimore’s 400 block?

A little commercial here…

We’ve been doing some updates to our website www.vallartarealestateguide.com over the past couple of weeks. A while back we installed Google Maps as another way to search for properties. It is now connected with the database for Multi-Dev Vallarta, the MLS for developments in and around Vallarta. If you go to the search page, and click on Google Search, you’ll see what we’ve done. If you want to watch a short video to see how it works and how to get the most of it, just scroll down this page a bit. 

You can click on a development name on the left side and you’ll be taken to the development’s location. On the pop-up info box you’ll get information and a photo. Click on the (+) and you get more information. Click on “Inventory”, and, if they are part of MLV and have entered their inventory, you’ll see what units they have for sale. Or just, click on any of the balloon markets on the page or scroll over them. Purple markets are for aerial images and red one’s are for developments.

They’ll be a few more improvements coming along in the next couple of weeks.

photo by flickr user unreliable narrator

If you’ve been jonesing for a new historically significant place to eat, you’re about to get your fix. This July, the B&O American Brasserie will open in the old B&O building in the Inner Harbor (2 N. Charles Street) as the first step to reintroducing the building as a Hotel Monaco (the first Kimpton Hotel in the city) later this year. The restaurant, whose name literally means “Baltimore and Ohio American French Brewery,” will have a full bar, some serious pizza ovens, a Franco-Italian-Spanish à la carte menu, and… breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The building, which was built in 1906  as the headquarters of the B&O Railroad, will continue to look the same (stately, posh) from the outside. Following the $60 million renovation, however, roughly a third of its 220,500 square feet will be dedicated to office space, while the top seven floors will house the Hotel Monaco’s 202 swanky rooms and suites. Right now, the hotel’s grand opening is scheduled for August 3, 2009.

The whole arrangement looks to be schmancy as all get-out, featuring such perks and details as in-room yoga accessories, hosted wine tasting in the “grand living room lobby,” complimentary shoeshine, and “companion goldfish” provided upon request. For most Baltimoreans, though, le Brasserie will be our only exposure to the vivisected B&O building. And for fans of Family Ties, that means one more spot for stalking beloved father-figure Michael Gross aka Steven Keaton. The actor will apparently be doing pro bono work as the first ever official spokesman for the B&O Railroad Museum. Gross is descended from old-time railroaders and is an enthusiastic collector of railroad memorabilia.

Photo by flickr user realmofreals

Occasionally it’s nice to be reminded of the good that big corporations can accomplish by way of their corporate bigness. Two years ago, ground broke on a new Fairfield Inn and Suites in the Inner Harbor (101 President Street) on the site of the old Baltimore Brewing Company. Aside from the usual fanfare that accompanies any expansion of Marriott’s bargain brand, there was some additional to-do over the Brewer’s Park location due to the company’s plans for not-yet-mandatory greenness. This summer the Fairfield Inn and Suites at President and Lombard will open as Baltimore’s first LEED-certified hotel.

LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an adaptable metric devised by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to accredit buildings at any and all stages of construction, use, and renovation. Greenness is a quality the categorical validity of which we’ve gradually come to accept as a culture, but if it is to have application beyond the realms of the Giving Tree and the Lorax, we need to recognize that it is not an innate quality like, say, redness, but rather a relative quality, like relevance. (Berkeleyites, relax.) As a yardstick for such things, LEED does an excellent job. It assesses not simply the PR friendliness of the building’s recycling program, but also its basic contextual soundness through evaluations of things like water and energy use, CO2 emissions, efficiency of materials, and structural compactness. Among other accomplishments, the Inner Harbor hotel has earned points for drawing power from the wind and the sun as well as incorporating signs, bricks, and storage tanks from the old brewery.

Thursday’s first-look construction tour of the site is already sold out, so you’ll have to wait until doors open in July. Then you and your sweetie can splurge on an environmentally responsible night of anonymous local romance. Or just stroll by and gawk.
What new green scenes have you noticed around Baltimore lately?

Photo by flickr user Cle0patra

Being the brooding idealist I was in high school, I sneered at the froth and fervor of the democratic process, wielding my somewhat facile argument that people who save up all their concern for one big vote tend to consider themselves, once having voted, off the hook for the next four years. Of course, plenty of people who vote also contribute time, work, and ideas to their communities between visits to the sacred booth. But there’s something about the power to complain (which is much of what we enjoy about elections, really) that sure gets our rocks off.

Back in February, a group of civic-minded volunteers threw together Stimuluswatch.org, a wiki-style website that makes available a list originally compiled for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The idea is that this list, which names possible job-creating projects proposed by the mayor of each participating city, might offer an opportunity for the public to kibbutz the new administration’s economic stimulus package before any real money had been spent. Each proposed project (remember: these are not yet actually part of any real plan) has been presented on the site in such a way that visitors can click, comment, and vote on whether or not the project is “critical.” The question, ‘critical to what?’ though begged, is never answered.

Setting aside such points of wiki-skepticism as self-selection bias, silent assent, diffused responsibility, mob zeal, and the difficulty of selling anyone anything simply by naming the thing in question and its price, it’s worth noting simply that most items on the list have currently been voted down by the cyber voting public. At last count, of Baltimore’s thirty-eight proposed projects, eight had non-negative vote ratios. A smattering of examples:
Park Heights Avenue Streetscape, $2,400,000: Denied
Chlorine Disinfection, $35,000,000: Denied
Signal Optimization – Phase Three, $1,500,000: Denied
Martin Luther King MS/HS Fire Safety, $350,000: Denied

Wishing you could learn a little more about these projects and what may or may not make them worth funding? That’s not an option at Stimuluswatch.org. There’s a reason Winston Churchill barely tolerated this form of government. The concept of Stimuluswatch.org is a shimmering promise of local involvement in national policy. Lending a fluid forum to those with the opportunity to speak knowledgeably about conditions in affected communities for the sake of informed collaborative thought could be as great in practice as it is in theory. This is a notion worth taking another swing at.

In the mean time, the website is so poorly and infrequently updated that it succeds only in tossing hypothetical dollar signs onto a blazing national mood of uninformed rage. To invert my favorite of Aesop’s lessons: it is easy to disparage even possible solutions.

Continuing development in Baltimore is proof that the times are changing. Or, there’s no better time to develop in Baltimore than when things are tough. Or, Baltimore developers fail to grasp toughness of times, make huge mistakes. Cases in point:

• Change of plans for the Baltimore City Entertainment Group’s proposed slot machine facility in South Baltimore. Used to be the site was going to house 500 glistening, revenue-generating slot machines, but as of this month the waterfront facility, named Gateway South, will contain within its 1.3 million square feet of mixed-use space a minimum of 3750 slot machines. The proposal is subject to zoning changes which are currently underway. They’re calling it a casino.

• Skyline Properties Management is buying a fixer-upper. Banking on the continuing queasiness of the housing market, the local real estate firm is planning to drop $6.5 million on a parcel of 160 townhouses in East Baltimore. Over the next two years, Skyline will spend another $6 million preparing the properties for rental (not sale!) to its target crowd of Johns Hopkins University students, hospital employees, and hangers on. The idea is that since Hopkins supplies the city with a significant fraction of its jobs, as long as the University keeps existing, its employees will have money to spend. More to the point, you have to live somewhere, so why not rent––from Skyline?

• Not everything’s rosy in East Baltimore. Canton Crossing, the proposed 23-story monolith that’s been calling itself “The City Within a City,” is looking shaky now that Silverton Bank, which had put $10 million into the development, is dead. The FDIC, in one of their spooky, the-calls-are-coming-from-inside-the-house takeovers, shuttered the bank’s windows at the top of May and has come looking for the ex-bank’s debtors. Among whom is Edward Hale, Sr., Baltimorean owner of a bank, a sports team, and Canton Crossing. Hale borrowed ten extra-large from Silverton Bank with visions of residential mega-complexes dancing in his head. It’s like the time that scummy French guy welshed on a loan from Artie Bucco and when Artie collapsed into a weeping pile, Tony cleaned things up and all of the sudden the French guy owed Tony the fifty thou. Kind of.

What new buildings and/or business have you noticed popping up in Baltimore lately?

Photo by flickr user sneakerdog

There’s plenty to say about the Red Line, the proposed extension of Baltimore’s Light Rail system which would span fourteen miles from east to west. Most of the logistical details you can find at the project’s website. And in fact you can read an entire pre-existing UDL article dealing with the debate over the Red Line’s potential impact on property value right here. But man oh man, people on the internet sure have been keyed up about the whole thing.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the controversy: either the Red Line will usher Baltimore City into an Obama-esque Golden Age, transforming suburban sprawl into blissful urban interdependence and parking lots into orchards filled with ice cream trees, or the Red Line will become an anarchic superhighway for the anonymous and vampiric poor, allowing––nay, urging––them to swarm the city’s white periphery and prey upon a defenseless upper-middle class. Give or take.

The Hunt Valley Towne Centre (118 Shawan Road Hunt Valley, MD 21030) is invoked by both sides as an example of the effects of public transit, as is the Lutherville Light Rail Stop (150 Ridgeley Road). Oodles of statistics have been slung around, and Godwin’s law has been borne out once again. Well, UDL is neither an organ of the state nor a fortress of socioeconomic empiricism, but here goes.

First, nothing is going to make Baltimore City a pleasure dome, but claims that Baltimore is not the sort of city for which public transit can work neglect the plain fact that London/Tokyo/D.C./Atlantis City /New York didn’t used to be either, until there was a public transit system in place there. C.S. Lewis would tell us we’ve got to have the bad tooth out before our ache will stop. A little more aspirin is just that, a little more aspirin. Second, the model of the city as a ring of alienated rich people with a nougaty crime center is a model that nobody actually believes in. Continuing to drive in and drive back out of the mess helps nothing. A functional public transit system is almost intrinsic to the form of the functional city.

I’m from Atlanta, so I understand the lure of automotive autonomy, but seriously, the math is bad. A certain stuffy German philosopher might say that it’s impossible to will that the maxim of our actions become universal law while driving forty minutes each way to work in a crumbling city for which we don’t pay taxes because we live forty minutes away in Scampering Otter Terrace. I’m just saying. I’ve been there.

An exemplum: in my tiny neighborhood in Baltimore, a friend of mine got jumped recently. A lot of families live in Abell, and there’s a playground within toddling distance. But each attack makes everyone (myself included) less willing to walk around outside. It’s easier just to lock the door and stay in, or at best to take a car, even if it’s only for a couple blocks. But the fewer people there are on the sidewalk, the easier it is to mug the stragglers. Resistance to community life is what created the inner-city vacuum in the first place, and the longer we put off reclaiming city life––which necessitates good public transit––the harder it’s going to be to reclaim it at all.

What’s your verdict on transportation, the Red Line, and Baltimore’s chances for becoming Utopia?