Dawn of a new age

I read this from those wacky Curbed people.



Related Cos. touts paperless lease process

I have been talking this for years.

Outsourcing rental brokers


Roll Call: What lies ahead

I stand corrected... on somethings

Rose Associates is already doing this.

The paperless application is going to be more prevalent even amongst smaller owners. In the near future there will be turnkey solutions that will many owners will run to in droves. It is simple really. Paper, although is cheap after awhile it takes up a lot of space. Go to any landlord's office and you will see file cabinets everywhere. Some landlords have to rent storage space for their records. The paperless application reduces all of that to one small server. And daily backups prevent any loss of data.

As I stated before, this is bad for brokers because one of the key rolesthey play is in preparing the leases for execution. If that is replaced by a website, what is the point of going to a broker? Eventually some enterprising individual is going to figure out how to adapt the paperless solution to condo and co-op board packages and people will be able to do them on their blackberries. This is also a bad thing for brokers.

More evidence that we are not out of the woods yet.

Bad Assets May Need More Support

Key takeaways

VALUE OF TOXIC ASSETS UNKNOWN

"No one has a good handle how much is out there," Warren said. "Here we are 10 months into this crisis...and we can't tell you what the dollar value is."

Estimates are that "somewhere between $600 billion and $1.5 trillion in toxic assets (is) spread across the balance sheets of the small and the large banks," Warren said, adding: "That's a lot."

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY TIME BOMB

The Congressional Oversight Panel said, however, that smaller U.S. banks faced billions of dollars in losses from delinquent commercial property loans and were far less able to raise capital and absorb losses than their larger counterparts.

An analysis done by the panel showed that under a scenario 20 percent worse than assumptions used in the Federal Reserve's stress tests, about 719 banks with assets between $600 million and $100 billion would need to raise some $21 billion in new capital to offset loan losses.

"Treasury must be prepared to turn its attention to small banks in crafting solutions to the growing problem of troubled whole loans," the panel said, adding that it should consider using similar stress tests -- along with pledges for additional capital -- on smaller institutions.

Brave New World indeed.