Real Estate - Recession and debt drag on commercial real estate

By ALEX VEIGA, AP Real Estate Writer Alex Veiga, Ap Real Estate Writer – Wed Aug 12, 4:23 pm ET

LOS ANGELES – Even as the housing market starts to show signs of recovery, fortunes for commercial real estate are looking increasingly grim — and that could spell trouble for the fragile U.S. banking sector.

The weak economy and rising unemployment have forced businesses to cut back on rental space, resulting in declining revenue for many landlords. And tighter underwriting standards and falling real estate values have made it much harder for them to refinance.

The rate at which property owners are defaulting on loans is climbing at an unparalleled pace. Many banks are stuck with shopping malls, hotels and offices buildings they've repossessed and can't sell. Scores of banks have been closed down this year, many of them, including Horizon Bank in Pine City, Minn., and Omni National in Atlanta, because of sour commercial loans.

"The bottom line: defaults are exploding," said Richard Parkus, an analyst with Deutsche Bank. "It's terrible. It's going to be worse than in the early '90s."

The delinquency rate on commercial property loans pooled together into investments, estimated at around $750 billion, hit nearly 3 percent in the second quarter, nearly tripling from where it was at the end of last year, according to Reis Inc.

"We haven't seen the end of these delinquencies and defaults," said Edward Leamer, a senior economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In all, there is about $3.5 trillion worth of commercial real estate loans held by banks, or tied up in commercial mortgage-backed securities or held by other institutions.

More than $2 trillion in commercial mortgages are expected to come due between now and 2013. But due to the tightened underwriting standards and falling real estate vales, many property owners will face an uphill battle qualifying for refinancing.

About half of the security-backed loans that have come due this year were refinanced, said Chris Stanley, a senior associate with Reis.

"That's a fairly low rate historically and signifies that people are still having trouble getting financing," Stanley said.

In some cases, landlords facing mounting debt payments are walking away from some of their properties if they can't find a buyer.

Just this week, Maguire Properties Inc. said it would stop making payments on more than $1 billion in loans for seven office buildings in Southern California. The company said it would try to sell the buildings or turn them over to the lenders. In June, Maguire sold off an office tower at a 35 percent discount.

Given the hurdles to refinancing, many publicly traded real estate investment trusts have taken another route: issuing stock and using the cash to help pay off their most pressing debts.

Between March and July, more than 50 REITs raised roughly $16.2 billion, according to Ronald Kuykendall, spokesman for the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, the industry's trade group.

Still, concerns over the health of the commercial real estate market has given investors some pause.

An initial public offering Wednesday by Starwood Property Trust Inc., which manages commercial mortgages and related investments, received a lackluster response from investors. The stock opened and closed at $20 a share, but traded slightly lower most of the day.

"The key issue in the commercial real estate market today is there is a lot of debt that is going to need to be refinanced," said Kuykendall. "The winners and losers in the market will be determined by who has the capability to eliminate those near-term debt obligations."

The commercial real estate market's fortunes depend largely on free-flowing credit markets and cranked up spending by businesses and consumers — neither of which economists expect will happen anytime soon. That means more commercial loan defaults.

Deutsche Bank's Parkus expects the market won't begin to turn around until 2012 at the earliest. By then, commercial property prices will have declined by as much as 50 percent from the peak in early 2007, he estimates. It will likely be worse in hard-hit areas like Manhattan's office market.

"We're going to be down a lot more," Parkus said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090812/ap_on_bi_ge/us_commercial_real_estate;_ylt=Am59pGE0AhLUvXg8CjCmDj51fNdF

Entertainment - Tributes for guitar legend Les Paul; dead at 94

Musicians worldwide are paying tribute to Les Paul, the music icon whose solid-body electric guitar paved the way for rock 'n' roll.

The guitar virtuoso who died Thursday at age 94 performed with some of early pop's biggest names and produced a slew of hits, many with wife Mary Ford. But it was his inventive streak that made him universally revered by guitar gods as their original ancestor and earned his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of the most important forces in popular music.

"He actually taught himself to play guitar in order to demonstrate his electronic theories," said Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. "All of us owe an unimaginable debt to his work and his talent."

Paul died in suburban White Plains of complications from pneumonia. He was remembered as a tireless tinkerer whose quest for a particular sound led him to create the first solid-body electric guitar. His invention became the standard instrument for legends like Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page.

"The name Les Paul is iconic and is known by aspiring and virtuoso guitar players worldwide," said Kiss front man Paul Stanley. "That guitar is the cornerstone of a lot of great music that has been made in the last 50 years."

Paul also developed technology that would become hallmarks of rock and pop recordings, from multitrack recording that allowed for multiple layers of "overdubs" to guitar reverb and other sound effects.

"He was a futurist, and unlike some futurists who write about it and predict things, he was a guy who actually did things," said Henry Juskiewicz, chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar, which mass produced Paul's original invention.

Private services are being planned for New York and Waukesha, Wis., Paul's home town, according to an obituary posted by the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City, where until recently Paul had played every week. Public memorial tributes also are being planned.

A musician since childhood, Paul experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called "The Log," a 4-by-4 piece of wood strung with steel strings. He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a traditional guitar shape.

The use of electric guitar gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s.

Leo Fender's Broadcaster was the first mass-produced solid body electric on the market in the late 1940s.

Gibson solicited Paul to create a prototype for a guitar and began making the Les Paul guitar in 1952. The Who's Townshend, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin's Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.

Born Lester William Polfuss on June 9, 1915, he began his career as a musician, billing himself as Red Hot Red or Rhubarb Red. He toured with the popular Chicago band Rube Tronson and His Texas Cowboys and led the house band on WJJD radio in Chicago.

In the mid-1930s he joined Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians and soon moved to New York to form the Les Paul Trio, with Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton.

His first records were released in 1944 on Decca Records. Later, with Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records for hits including "Vaya Con Dios" and "How High the Moon," which both hit No. 1.

He had met Ford, then known as Colleen Summers, in the 1940s while working as a studio musician in Los Angeles. For seven years in the 1950s, Paul and Ford broadcast a TV show from their home in Mahwah, N.J. (Ford died in 1977, 15 years after they divorced).

In 1948, Paul and Ford were seriously injured in a car crash. Among other injuries, Paul's right elbow was crushed and doctors set it at an angle so he could continue to play guitar, Robb Lawrence, a former concert tech for Paul, says in the 2008 book "The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy."

Paul had made his first attempt at audio amplification at age 13. Unhappy with the amount of volume produced by his acoustic guitar, he tried placing a telephone receiver under the strings. Although this worked to some extent, only two strings were amplified and the volume level was still too low.

By placing a phonograph needle in the guitar, all six strings were amplified, which proved to be much louder. Paul was playing a working prototype of the electric guitar in 1929.

His work on recording techniques began in the years after World War II, when Bing Crosby gave him a tape recorder. Drawing on his earlier experimentation with his homemade recording machine, Paul added an additional playback head to the recorder. The result was a delayed effect that became known as tape echo.

Tape echo gave the recording a more "live" feel and enabled the user to simulate different playing environments.

Paul's next idea was to stack together eight mono tape machines and send their outputs to one piece of tape, stacking the recording heads on top of one another. The resulting machine served as the forerunner to today's multitrack recorders. Many of his songs with Ford used overdubbing techniques that Paul had helped develop.

Paul's use of multitrack recording was unique. Before he did it, most recordings were made on a single tape. By recording each element separately, from the vocals to instrumentation on different tracks, they could be mixed and layered, adding to the richness in sound.

In 1954, Paul commissioned the first eight-track tape recorder, later known as "Sel-Sync," in which a recording head could simultaneously record a new track and play back previous ones.

In the late 1960s, Paul retired from music to concentrate on his inventions. His interest in country music was rekindled in the mid-'70s, and he teamed with Chet Atkins for two albums. The duo won a Grammy for best country instrumental performance of 1976 for their "Chester and Lester" album.

In 2005, he released the Grammy-winning "Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played," his first album of new material since those 1970s recordings and his first official rock CD. Among those playing with him: Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Richie Sambora.

"They're not only my friends, but they're great players," Paul told The Associated Press. "I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message."

Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.

http://new.music.yahoo.com/les-paul/news/guitar-legend-inventor-les-paul-dies-at-age-94--61992735

Lifestyle - 10 Annoying Text Habits to Avoid

Unless you're living a seriously alternative lifestyle, you've probably been communicating via text for a while now. You text your friends, your dates -- even your parents. It's quick, convenient, and usually makes your life more pleasant... except when you come face to face with the 10 worst texting offenses in the world. Check 'em out below, plus some advice on how to stop offenders in their tracks.

More Dating Articles from Cosmopolitan:

• How to Tell if a Guy is Cheating
• Eight New Love Truths You Must Know

#1. The Mass Text

It's Friday night, you're at home on the couch, and you get a text that goes something like this: "What are you getting into tonight?" You know for a fact that this very same text just went out to 20 other people at exactly the same time, and that the sender is just waiting to receive all his/her options before deciding what to do. So what if the only thing you have planned for the night is that lame (but sooo good) Lifetime movie at 11? You refuse to hang out with someone unless they make specific plans to hang out with you. You know how you can block those newsletters that you never signed up for by sending an email with "unsubscribe" in the body? We suggest doing the same thing in a reply-text.

#2. The Texting Cult

There is always at least one point in the night -- a lull in the conversation, a pause between thoughts -- when it gets really quiet, and you look around and realize that all your friends are busy texting. One person pulls out her iPhone while everyone else is looking at the dinner bill, and then someone else starts doing it, and before you know it, you're in the middle of the sacred circle of text. Resist the urge to choose some random person in your contacts to send a useless message to. Instead, pull out your phone and send a text to everyone at the table asking, "Should we order something else?" It will make everyone laugh but also point out the silliness of the situation.

#3. The Double Message

Of course you screen calls. Everyone does. Sometimes you're in the middle of something and sometimes you just don't feel like talking. But your phone is still working, and you see the missed call and the voice message alert. So why -- why?! -- do certain people feel the need to send a text letting you know that they just left a message? Don't they realize that if someone is smart enough to read a text, they're also capable of understanding what the little bobble head with the sound waves coming out of him symbolizes? Text back, "What's next, a carrier pigeon?"

#4: The Texting Tease

You're seeing a really cute/smart/funny/cool new guy, and your heart skips a tiny beat every time you get a text from him. In the middle of the week, you get one asking what you're up to this weekend. Assuming he wants to do something together, you let him know that it's looking pretty relaxed so far. Does he then proceed to make a plan with you? No. He responds, "Oh OK, cool." You stand there with a perplexed look on your face. Respond "Yeah, but call my secretary if you want to schedule something." This way, the ball is in his court, but ultimately you're the one who is in charge, thanks to your confident attitude.

#5. The Bulk Texter

An example of what a series of texts from this person might look like:

1. Hey!
2. What's up?
3. What are you doing tonight?
4. Some of us are going to Cool People Club tonight.
5. Around 10
6. It's gonna be me and Chris
7. Are you coming?
8. Let us know
9. Byeee!
10. lolz

An example of what that exchange should look like:

Text 1: Hey, Chris and I are going to Cool People Bar around 10 tonight. Let us know if you wanna come.

An example of what you could text back:

1. Please
2. never
3. text
4. me
5. this
6. way
7. again.(one minute pause)
8. For "realz."

6. The Bored Texter

You've just finished a sufficiently long and entertaining texting exchange with someone, and now you're ready to put your phone down for a little while. But your phone dings, and it's another text from said person. It looks like this: "Soooo..." Or, "What upppp." Or, "la la la..." Clearly, they have nothing else to say and just want something to do. Send a text saying, "Running, watching movies, reading books, baking." Your buddy will get the point that some people actually have a life.

7. The Show-and-Teller

Love is wonderful. We're huge advocates of love and being in love and enjoying that love. People gushing on and on about their amazing love life? Not so much. Not only do you have to listen to them tell every insignificant story about how cute it was that their boyfriends ate pancakes for dinner and woke up with a funny hairdo, but you also have to read all of their SUPER-cute texts. "Guys, look what he wrote to me! Omg look at what he said now! Haha aww, look at this one!!" The cure? A dose of their own medicine. "Hey, look what my mom said about her gallbladder! Omg you won't believe how I'm planning to organize my sock drawer! Aww, my dog is wagging his tail. Oh, he's doing it again!!"

8. The Goobers-and-Popcorn Texter

The previews are over, you've been waiting to see this movie for weeks, and here you finally are, snacks in hand. But the guy in front of you insists on ruining your experience by texting for the entire 96 minutes. Here's a little secret he doesn't know: EVERYONE sees his phone lighting up. And hears it vibrating violently every two minutes. When the lights come up at the end of the flick, call up a friend and loudly discuss how rude the guy texting throughout the entire movie was. Then get ready to start running.

9. The Lingering K

This one is especially aggravating if you're not on an unlimited texting plan. You get a message asking how your day went or if you'll be free at a certain time, so you send back a detailed and informative reply. Your phone dings again. You open the message and it says..."k." Do people not even have the decency to include the o? The offender doesn't even need to reply to the message. But if they feel the need to, could they not at least drum up something a little more personal/creative/not totally unnecessary? Respond by letting them know how much, to the cent, they owe you for superfluous texts the next time you're together. Then hold your palm out expectantly.

10. The Needs-to-Grow-Up Texter

Guys should never, ever get comfortable with using text slang and abbreviations. Whether he's a friend, date, or boyfriend, no girl wants to associate the men in their lives with tween-speak. The next time he sends you a "TTY L8ER" or "C U 2morrow," tell him that he should really consider an iPhone, BlackBerry, Sidekick, or "anything that gives you more room to text." He'll realize how outdated his text-talk is.

http://dating.personals.yahoo.com/singles/datingtips/88456/dating-advice-10-annoying-text-habits-to-avoid/;_ylt=AgX3v45OYohwvyVDoT8ZTb2CfNdF

Weather Forecast - Hurricane Bill gains strength on Atlantic track

By Jim Loney Jim Loney – 2 hrs 42 mins ago

MIAMI (Reuters) – Hurricane Bill, the first hurricane of the 2009 Atlantic season, revved up quickly as it headed toward Bermuda on Monday, while the remnants of Tropical Storm Ana dissipated without threatening the U.S. Gulf oil patch.

Once a worrisome storm, Ana was little more than a cluster of thunderstorms as it raced through the Caribbean Sea south of Puerto Rico on a track that could take it into the eastern Gulf of Mexico by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, Bill was steering well clear of the U.S. Gulf energy fields on a path that would take it north of the Caribbean islands in the general direction of Bermuda. Forecasters said it would be west of the British territory by Saturday morning.

Energy markets quaver at Gulf storms because the region produces a quarter of U.S. oil and 15 percent of its natural gas and some forecasters noted that Ana had already regenerated once.

Storm watches and warnings for Ana were dropped and the U.S. National Hurricane Center said the system had lost its swirling wind pattern, but could still bring heavy rainfall to the northern Caribbean islands in its path.

Ana drenched Puerto Rico as it raced toward Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It was about 145 miles east-southeast of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic when the hurricane center issued its final advisory on the system on Monday afternoon.

In the mid-Atlantic, Hurricane Bill's top winds reached 90 mph, just below Category 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, the Miami-based hurricane center said.

MAJOR HURRICANE EXPECTED

Forecasters expected it to hit Category 3, with winds of more than 110 mph by Wednesday. Category 3, 4 and 5 storms are considered "major" hurricanes, the most destructive kind.

At 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) Bill was about 975 miles east of the Lesser Antilles and headed west-northwest at 16 mph, the hurricane center said. It was expected to curve more to the north as it nears Bermuda later in the week.

The timing of that turn will determine whether Bermuda is spared a direct hit and whether the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast feels the storm's outer fringes.

Tropical Storm Claudette hit the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast near Fort Walton Beach in the Florida panhandle early on Monday and quickly weakened to a tropical depression as it moved over southern Alabama.

Florida emergency managers reported sporadic power outages but no widespread damage. They cautioned residents to watch for rising rivers and flooding in low-lying areas.

Claudette, which sprouted with surprising speed on Sunday in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, missed the largest concentration of U.S. oil and gas production platforms, which stretch along the coast from Mobile Bay, Alabama, to Brownsville, Texas.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090817/us_nm/us_weather_st0rms;_ylt=ApQbnC2aSrdJU0_jtn8MXdyCfNdF