San Jacinto Land Sells for $4.3M

Buyer to to hold former driving range for investment

The Gohar Barsegian Inter Vivos Trust bought 14.22 acres of land located at 936 Idyllwild Dr in San Jacinto from 218 LLC for $4.3 million, or approximately $302,391 per acre. The seller was Danny Pakravan of Encino, CA.

Previously used as a driving range, the land has all utilites on site. The buyer intends to hold the property as an investment.

Hooman Ghaffari of Marcus & Millichap represented both the buyer and seller in this transaction.

Freedom Storage Sells for $9.5 Million

91,000+sf Self Storage Facility Sells for $104 PSF

The Freedom Self Storage property at 30630 State Highway 74 in Homeland, CA sold in early April for $9.5 million. The 91,354-square-foot self-storage facility and car wash was built in 2004. Significant finishing work and construction was completed on the property.

The new owners will occupy the property and will continue to operate it under the Freedom Self Storage and Car Wash banner.

Thomas Leeman of Franklin Croft Inc. represented the seller, Brian Tracy International. The buyer, Strategic Property Management, represented itself.

PAUL TECSON’S NOTE: In the future, the major transportation and infrastructure projects will become a Public-Private-Partnership (P-3). In California, the first P-3 Project will be the High Desert Corridor Project, a new freeway that will link the Interstate 15, Highway 395, freeway 14 to freeway 5 located in the Inland Empire’s Victor Valley region.

SPECIAL REPORT: FEATURED ARTICLE FOR COSTAR ADVISOR

For Whom the Toll$ Billions? U.S. Infrastructure Investment Attracting Global Players

Global Interest in Infrastructure Investing Heads Down Pennsylvania Turnpike

The nation’s oldest turnpike is now the center of attention in one of the newest developments in international private equity investments in specialty real estate. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has selected a consortium of some of the world’s top investment and infrastructure companies as the highest bidder to lease and manage the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the next 75 years. The bid to privatize the toll road totals $12.8 billion.

The consortium is led by Spain-based abertis, one of the largest toll road operators in the world; Citi Infrastructure Investors, a division of Citi, a leading global financial services company; and Criteria CaixaCorp, an investment holding company controlled by Spanish savings bank La Caixa. The deal marks abertis’ entry in the U.S. toll road market.

But like anyone who has driven the turnpike and is familiar with its potholes, heavy commercial traffic and persistent lane closures, the winning bidders may also find the road to final award of a contract will be no easy pass.

The 359-mile Pennsylvania Turnpike system services one of the most highly developed regions of the U.S., linking the major urban areas of Philadelphia, Scranton, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh and links up with toll roads to Boston, New York and Chicago. Drivers and passengers in the average 35,000 vehicles per day that stop at its 57 tollbooths and 20 service plazas generate annual revenues of more than $600 million.

If award of the contract were eventually approved, it would be one of the largest public private partnership initiatives ever undertaken in the U.S.

The U.S. represents a strategic market for abertis and its partners where abertis is already present via its airport business that manages the Orlando-Sanford airport and the Atlanta international terminal, one of the busiest in the world.

It also affords the consortium a position from which to embark on additional growth opportunities and boosts its scope for expanding into other sectors in the U.S., the largest market in the world.

“We urgently need new funding for road and bridge repair, and a turnpike lease will help us meet that need,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell in announcing the award. “Under the terms and conditions we set, the turnpike will be upgraded and tolls will be no higher than the Turnpike Commission will charge. Where Pennsylvanians will see a major difference is on our other roads. Road repair all over the state will accelerate and we will be able to cancel the plan to impose tolls on Interstate 80.”

“The $12.8 billion lease payment would be dedicated to road and bridge repair and support 73 public transit agencies across the state,” Rendell said. “By investing the money for the long term, the lease plan would generate annual payouts for transportation over the 75-year life of the lease. These payments would average 13% higher than the maximum available under the I-80 tolling plan, assuming investment returns equal to the average earnings of the Pennsylvania State Employee Retirement System over the past 20 years.”

As part of its plan, the consortium would implement a capital investment plan of $5.5 billion to improve the toll road.

Final acceptance of the winning bid will require enactment of legislation by the Pennsylvania General Assembly and will require modification of Act 44 — the most recent legislative action on transportation funding in July 2007.

Act 44 directs the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission to apply to the U.S. Department of Transportation for permission to impose tolls on Interstate 80. If approval is granted, the Turnpike Commission would make annual payments to PennDOT averaging $944 million per year for the first 10 years, and larger amounts thereafter.

However, federal legislation has been introduced that would prohibit imposing tolls on I-80. If permission to toll I-80 were not granted, payments to PennDOT would fall to $450 million per year with no escalation.

That was the impetus behind Rendell’s decision to privatize the turnpike and ensure a steady more predictable stream of income.

However, there are major obstacles facing abertis and Citi. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission opposes Gov. Rendell’s plan to privatize the road. For starters, privatization could eliminate many of the more 2,200 employees of the commission, including the 1,765 workers employed under a collective bargaining agreement.

“The Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association (PMTA) is concerned with the current state of Pennsylvania’s aging infrastructure, but the governor’s solution to effectively sell our Turnpike for 75 years does not meet the needs of the transportation community at large,” said Jim Runk, president of PMTA. “We Pennsylvanians are anxious to repair our transportation infrastructure, but with the federal government planning to evaluate it on a national level in 2009, we should be leery of speeding forward with a plan that does not take federal solutions into account. If we bypass a thoughtful and transparent debate on how to best manage these necessary improvements, we risk punting the ramifications of a near-sighted solution to our children. We urge legislators to consider whether this proposed solution will truly improve travel for Pennsylvania motorists along our main artery.”

Robert E. Latham, executive vice president of Associated Pennsylvania Constructors and spokesman for the Transportation Construction Industries coalition, said: “Replacing one inadequate funding source with another inadequate funding source does not constitute a vision for Pennsylvania’s future mobility. Neither the I-80 tolling plan nor the Turnpike lease plan will provide all the revenue necessary to repair the existing highway system or provide for the expansion required for economic growth.”

When Gov. Rendell outlined his privatization plan in April, Turnpike CEO Joe Brimmeier said, “We are obviously disappointed that the Rendell administration has taken this step. We remain committed to implementing Act 44 - which was signed into law just nine months ago by Gov. Ed Rendell. We’ve made tremendous progress.”

At that time Brimmeier outlined a long list of concerns about the plan - none of which he backed off of this week, when the consortium submitted its bid.

• What will the impact be on the Commonwealth’s 73 mass transit agencies, which have already started to see the benefits of Act 44? (Act 44 provides mass transit with $37 billion in the next 50 years.)
• What is the Commonwealth’s plan for the inevitable reconstruction of I-80 (the need for which will now be accelerated due to the diverted traffic from the mainline of the Turnpike)?
• Will the winning bidder be held responsible for any capital improvements for projects required after the first 10 years of the lease?
• How will the administration ensure that any lump-sum payment for the lease agreement will be properly invested and safeguarded against re-direction for non-transportation purposes?
• What will happen in the event of a default by the concessionaire? Will its creditors have the ability to step in?

Salvador Alemany, CEO of abertis, says his firm is equipped to handle the controversy.

“Gov. Rendell’s decision presents our group with a new challenge, similar to the one we faced when we integrated Aurea and Acesa Infraestructuras back in 2003, or when we acquired TBI’s airport business in 2005, thereby gaining a foothold in the U.S., and when we participated in the privatization of sanef in 2006, a process which set a precedent for the tender awarded today by the state of Pennsylvania. We will rise to the challenge and the trust placed in our consortium,” Alemany said this week.

Global interest in infrastructure investments is increasing, according to Deloitte, a global professional services and accounting firm.

And it’s not just in toll roads. Bridges, ports, schools, public housing, prisons and defense facilities and water treatment plants around the world are in urgent need of repair and upgrade. This infrastructure deficit, as it’s called, is expected to grow a lot worse without concerted remedial action, Deloitte reported this spring in a report entitled: Closing the Infrastructure Gap: The Role of Public-Private Partnerships.

In the U.S. alone, the potential infrastructure market may amount to $3 trillion, Deloitte estimated.

Infrastructure assets offer stable long-term returns with running yields and have high barriers to entry. Also, as budgetary pressures worldwide provide greater incentives for governments to explore alternatives to financing public services as Pennsylvania is doing, there is a steady flow of new opportunities coming to market either through public/private partnerships, or direct private investment.

Fourteen investment groups initially looked at the opportunity of taking over the Pennsylvania Turnpike and eventually three serious bidders stepped forward.

A consortium made up of Spain-based Cintra and Australia’s Macquarie Infrastructure Group decided against increasing their bid and New York’s Goldman Sachs, which partnered with Transurban and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, came in below abertis and Citi.

Citi Infrastructure Investors was formed in May of last year to capitalize on the growing trend to manage equity investments in infrastructure assets and to oversee a management company focused on the operation of these investments. The Pennsylvania Turnpike bid was its second major win this past week. It also entered into a partnership with the Vancouver Airport Authority to pursue the sourcing, funding and maximization of potential airport opportunities.

Babcock & Brown, an international investment and specialized fund and asset management group, is working with Citi. Earlier this year, Babcock & Brown raised $450 million of committed capital for infrastructure investment opportunities in the North American markets. This increased its capital raised for investment in North American infrastructure projects to approximately $1.85 billion. Babcock & Brown holds investments in the Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America and the ICS port.

Now is the perfect time to built your wealth portfolio in land. To your continual success!

Andy Huang

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Here is an interesting article today from NEW YORK (CNN) — Washington Mutual told employees Monday that it will exit the wholesale lending business and close home-loan centers nationwide.

Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings-and-loan association, is taking those steps to focus on delivering home-lending products to customers through banking stores and online, a WaMu spokesperson said.

Sara Gaugl, WaMu spokesperson, told CNN that the bank will no longer work with third party brokers. She said WaMu also will close its remaining stand-alone Home Loan Centers.

Gaugl said the company has not posted specific information about how many stores and employees will be affected.

The bank is close to a deal with private-equity firm TPG and other investors to receive a $5 billion investment, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The infusion would help WaMu meet its pressing capital requirements as the bank faces steep losses stemming from the housing crisis.

——

Would be very interesting to see how the financial market will turn out. The housing crisis is a goldmine for those who knows how to play the downside correctly.

To your continual success!

Andy Huang

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FRONT PAGE NEWS OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TODAY - THIS IS NO “APRIL FOOLS” JOKE

Americans Delay Retirement As Housing, Stocks Swoon

Nest Eggs Shrink, Deferring Dreams; ‘Freaked Out’ Elite

By JENNIFER LEVITZ

April 1, 2008

As the falling real-estate and stock markets erode their savings, many aging Americans are delaying retirement, electing labor over leisure in uncertain times.

A three-decade veteran at International Business Machines Corp., Dick Boice had planned to sell his house, pack up and move to Arizona with his wife, Lauren, to take early retirement. But two months after the January date he set to exit the work world, Mr. Boice, who is 59 years old, is still on the job. He figures he’ll stay put for another couple of years.

The Boices had counted on proceeds from the house sale to boost their retirement income. After a year on the market, the roomy colonial in Blue Springs, Mo., didn’t move, forcing the couple to cut the asking price by $40,000 to around $250,000. The house remains unsold. Meanwhile, Mr. Boice has watched the value of his 401(k) and individual retirement accounts fall by roughly 20% so far this year, to a combined $240,000.

“Everything is just heading south,” says Mr. Boice, who works in client support for IBM in Kansas City, Mo. “You can’t hardly make any kinds of plans because you don’t know what you can count on.”

Mr. Boice has plenty of graying company at the grindstone. Millions of retirement-age Americans, stung by the recent economic pall, suddenly are having to reassess their plans — with many forced to quickly change course. In February, the proportion of people ages 55 to 64 in the work force rose to 64.8%, up 1.5 percentage points from last April. That translates to more than an additional million people in the job pool, according to the U.S. Labor Department. The ranks of those 65 and over in the work force rose to 16.2% from 16% in the same time span — meaning 212,000 more hands on deck. So far, the numbers for March continue to show a “sharp” increase, says Steve Hipple, a department economist.

While many Americans are still sitting on large gains from homes and stocks bought years ago, today’s market turmoil is shaping up to be the most painful in decades. Nationally, house prices have fallen 10% or so in the past year. And the quarter ended Monday marked the worst period for stocks in 5½ years, with equities off 15.5% from their October highs.

The double dip, affecting asset owners of every age bracket, is unprecedented in recent decades. In 1987, property and market values dropped in tandem — but nowhere near the extent to what’s happening now. To document similar conditions, “you’d have to go back to the era of the [Great] Depression,” says financial historian Richard Sylla of New York University’s Stern School of Business.

With their homes worth less, fewer people feel confident enough to retire, even if they plan to continue living in them. And unlike younger workers, they don’t have years to make up for downturns in the stock market. As a result, they worry that their investments will diminish to the point that they won’t have enough money to get through retirement.

TOILING LONGER

• The Situation: Demographers have been predicting a ‘gray wave’ — an exodus of older workers from the labor force. Instead, the ranks of retirement-eligible Americans in the workplace is growing.

• Background: The shift is being fueled by falling stocks and home values.

• The Impact: Delayed retirements could ease the burden on Social Security but could also create more job competition in certain industries.

According to economists and demographers, a huge exodus from the work force should be happening. The first of 78 million baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, passed the 60-year-old mark two years ago. And 2008 was expected to be a banner retirement year, with the oldest boomers reaching 62 — the earliest age for collecting Social Security. When the first boomer drew a benefit on Feb. 12, the Social Security Administration described it as the start of “America’s silver tsunami.”

Gray Wave

The giant gray wave is still an inevitability. But it has run into a breakwall. Investment advisers and retirement planners at more than a dozen firms, including Charles Schwab Corp., Edward Jones and Merrill Lynch & Co., say they are seeing large numbers of older workers put off retirement as the housing and stock-market troubles have deepened.

A recent Schwab survey of 1,006 financial advisers indicated that nearly a quarter of their clients are considering working longer specifically because of the economic fallout of the past 12 months.

Factors other than the gloomy economic outlook may be contributing to stalled retirements, says Mr. Hipple of the Labor Department. Most retirees, of course, get Social Security benefits. But traditional corporate pension plans — which promised specific, predictable monthly payouts — are largely a thing of the past.

Over the past three decades, the 401(k) plan has gradually supplanted pension plans as the main source of retirement coverage for U.S. workers in the private sector, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit group. In 1979, it says, 62% of U.S. employees participated only in a pension plan. By 2005, 63% of workers reported that they participated only in a 401(k) plan.

Another big motivation for older workers to stay on the job: scarce health benefits for retirees. Between 1988 and 2007, the percentage of large companies offering retiree health benefits fell by half, to 33%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

‘Double Whammy’

The dot-com bust and stock plunge of 2000-02 also persuaded some workers to delay retirement. But back then, those suffering losses in the stock market could take comfort in home values, which were still appreciating. Not anymore. “It’s a double whammy this go-around,” says Kevin Waldron, a Merrill Lynch financial adviser in Bala Cynwyd, Pa.

Many would-be retirees are angry about the conditions that they see as contributing to the economic downturn. Mr. Boice blames lax lending standards and regulations for dragging down his home value. “What really needs to happen at this point,” he says, “is for those that created the subprime mess to have their hands slapped.”

In Healdsburg, Calif., Jeff Bartman, who has also shifted retirement gears, still considers himself fortunate compared with others. But he points to the Bush administration for many of the country’s current woes. “The war, housing, $100 oil…when you look at those things, you blame management. You blame the people running the show,” he says.

Seniors delaying retirement could create competition for jobs with younger workers and put more pressure on the unemployment rate, which at 4.8% remains low, but has been edging up in recent months. The squeeze could be especially acute in industries that require less-skilled workers, says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, in Washington.

However, there is a potential upside. People who earn more as they age may rely less on Social Security, easing the burden on these programs — including Medicare — and keeping them solvent for longer. The trend could also be good news for “knowledge-based industries,” such as technology, science, and health care, which are predicted to suffer from a drain of experienced workers, says Mr. Frey.

Still, the prospect of millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden years doesn’t square with the American Dream. Some aging workers feel denied their due. “I’ve worked all my life,” says Mr. Boice, the IBMer. “It’s coming down to a point where I want to try to take life easier and do something I want to do rather than work for someone 9 to 5.”

The slumping real-estate market in Sarasota, Fla., has damped the longtime retirement dreams of Betty Greenspan, 65. In 2005, she and her husband, Richard, a dentist, invested a chunk of their assets — nearly $800,000 — in two condominiums. At the time, they believed that real estate was a safer, more lucrative, bet than the stock market. They had hoped to sell the properties in two years and use the proceeds to buy a boat, which they would live on — sailing around the Caribbean. They were so sure of their plans that they put a $15,000 deposit on a $400,000, 44-foot catamaran. “That was the fantasy,” says Ms. Greenspan.

Now they are stuck with two depreciating properties. Home prices in Sarasota plunged an average of 15.4% from the fall of 2006 to the fall of 2007. Today, units similar to one of their condos, for which they paid $500,000, are fetching only around $400,000. They still don’t own the boat, which is being held for them.

Ms. Greenspan is working as a Realtor, a part-time nurse and is also selling flowers. Her husband spends four days a week at his dental practice. While they both still enjoy their work, “we should be out on our boat,” says Ms. Greenspan.

Bob Sakakeeny, 65, says it’s the “wave after wave of bad economic news” that has caused him to recently put off retirement from his job at Hewlett-Packard Co. Mr. Sakakeeny, who works in analyst relations for H-P in Worcester, Mass., is one of many older workers with diminished pensions who increasingly must rely on the volatile securities market.

Over his career, Mr. Sakakeeny worked for many outfits in the technology industry. Some companies didn’t have traditional pension plans, or were in the process of phasing them out. H-P, which he joined in 2001, began scaling back its pension plan in 2005,significantly reducing payouts for many employees.

When he retires, Mr. Sakakeeny estimates he will have an $800 monthly pension benefit from H-P. Beyond that, he is primarily “self funded” through a 401(k) and personal after-tax savings. Mr. Sakakeeny had planned to leave his job in the “near term,” but when his portfolio of mutual funds fell by 12% in January — and stayed down — he decided that “retirement has to be put on the back burner until things settle down.”

Even people who are well situated to retire are suddenly “freaked out” at the prospect of losing a paycheck, says Bonnie Hughes, a financial adviser with A & H Financial Planning & Education Inc. in Kennesaw, Ga. The recent headlines about big losses at Wall Street firms “work on them psychologically” because “we’re talking about banks,” she adds. “They get nervous when banks get nervous.”

Ellen Minter and her husband, Jeff Bartman, spent 30 years in demanding, mid-six-figure jobs in the tech industry, most recently at SAP AG, the German software company. Both in their mid 50s, they began laying the groundwork for early retirement last year. They moved from near San Francisco to Healdsburg, in wine country. They devoured books about retirement. They calculated future cash-flow needs with great precision — even considering how often they would want to eat out.

Running the Numbers

With several millions set aside, they assumed they’d need a minimum annual return on their assets of 3% annually to retire a few years early. “I have spread sheets up the yin yang,” says Ms. Minter. “We ran every kind of number through every kind of model. I figured, ‘OK, we’ve got it all together.’”

Ms. Minter retired from SAP in October. She sold her workaday Chanel suits on eBay, traded her Lexus convertible for a freewheeling Volkswagen Beetle and started painting watercolors. On Jan. 1, Mr. Bartman, 57, also retired from the company. That night, they opened a bottle of 1996 Cabernet they’d bought in France years back and toasted their future.

After their stocks began heading south, the glow dimmed fast — especially for her husband. “Every morning over coffee, he’d just sit there and say, ‘Do you know how much the market has fallen? Do you know how much the market has fallen?’” Ms. Minter says.

By February, she heard him on the phone, poking around the job market to see what was available. Mr. Bartman says the gloomy economic conditions, plus the uncertainty in an election year, got to him. It “made me feel, well, I can keep going,” he says. “My feeling was to ride out this uncertainty — I’ll keep working.”

Mr. Bartman is interviewing for a new full-time job in technology. His wife plans to stay retired. Meanwhile, the couple says that they have moved more of their portfolio into safer money-market funds.

ADDITONAL NOTES: HERE’S A CLIP OF A RECENT NEWS ARTICLE FROM THE BUSINESS SECTION OF MY LOCAL NEWSPAPER, THE PRESS ENTERPRISE. AS YOU CAN SEE, AS THE BABYBOOMERS APPROACH RETIREMENT AGE, SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WILL TAKE A BIG HIT AND NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT OR TRYING TO FIX THIS IMPENDING FINANCIAL DISASTER IN THE FUTURE. THE LESSON HERE IS FOR US TO LEARN ABOUT THIS POTENTIAL PROBLEMS AND TO PREPARE FOR OUR OWN BETTER FINANCIAL FUTURE WITHOUT RELYING ON CORPORATE AMERICA AND THE GOVERNMENT.

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