The Commercial real estate sector is a major consumer of electricity as electricity is used for climate control, elevators, lighting and other building amenities. Surprisingly little empirical work has studied this topic. REITs and other major holders of commercial real estate have an incentive...

One of the great features of cities is that they economize on transportation costs and allow more trade to take place. Workers wake up and must go to work. If such workers could move at 1 million MPH, they would have more jobs to choose from. If the "time price" of an activity decreases, then the...

This blog, brought to you by the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, will offer readers insights about real estate markets and urban issues from a diverse set of UCLA scholars. We expect that faculty and students from the Anderson School of Management, the Economics Department, the Department of ...

Does installing solar panels raise the resale value of a home? In a recent Ziman Center Working Paper, Sam Dastrup, Josh Graff-Zivin and Dora Costa and I have studied the resale price of single family homes in San Diego and Sacramento. For a large sample of residential homes, we collected info...

Will the introduction of paying state sales taxes induce Amazon to locate warehouses close to major cities? Case-Shiller Price Indices for May 2011 Crime Maps for Los Angeles County

There is a fair bit of "doom and gloom" in this LA Times piece about residential housing trends. One way to increase the demand for housing in major cities is to cater to international buyers. On the front page of today's NY Times is an article about a rising new condo boom in Miami. Here is ...

While I was in Beijing in July 2011, I spoke to real estate scholars who live and work there about the "China real estate bubble hypothesis". These scholars own apartments in Beijing and they remain "bullish" on Chinese urban real estate investments. Why? Irrational exuberance? I don't th...

As the economic recovery hangs in balance, lawmakers play partisan chicken with the debt ceiling. Policy mistakes matter. Early in the Great Depression, for example, efforts to reduce the deficit and balance the federal budget exacerbated the downturn by reducing an important component of aggr...

Phil Strahan and co-authors have just released an important paper . Here is their paper's abstract: We examine whether rating agencies (Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch) reward large issuers of mortgage-backed securities, who bring substantial business, by granting them unduly favorable ratings. The ini...

As we watch the slow-motion trains lumbering toward each other in Washington, more and more observers begin to contemplate that it could really happen: a US debt default. What does it mean in real estate? Much of the press in the last week tells us that investors have moved from a belief tha...

Joel Kotkin has written a provocative piece for the Wall Street Journal that examines why Los Angeles has "lost its mojo". While he doesn't mention Phil Jackson's retirement or the Dodger owners' divorce or the absence of the Doors' Jim Morrison, he does focus on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He...

If you had $1.5 million dollars to invest in real estate, which of the following three options would you choose? A. a 1700 square foot home with an ocean view near Santa Cruz, CA in Aptos B. A 3900 square foot home on 58 acres in Indiana C. a 5000 square foot home in Bridewater, CT on 7 acres T...

As discussion about federal deficit reduction continues, there will be debate about "optimal housing policy". Should homeowners be allowed to deduct mortgage interest payments from their annual income? Should the GSEs reduce the size of the jumbo loans that they are willing to purchase? ...

I have served on the UCLA faculty for five years. During this time, retail stores in Westwood Village continue to close. This trend hurts UCLA and surprises long time residents. They recall the good old days when Westwood Village was a more vibrant shopping area. Today, its restaurants and ...

I am spending the next ten days in Bozeman, Montana. A leading environmental economics think tank called PERC is here. Yellowstone National Park isn't far away. What about real estate prices here? There are some very nice homes priced at roughly $150 per square foot.

Written by Joshua Eli Yaghoubzadeh, UCLA School of Law Class of 2012 LOS ANGELES—Bank of America announced four weeks ago an agreement to pay $8.5 billion to a group of investors who purchased mortgage-backed securities before the housing meltdown. The investors, which included Blackrock Inc.,...

I have been attending a great conference on adaptation to climate change at PERC. The participants are realists who take the challenge of climate change very seriously. The attendees are mostly economists who believe that people are forward looking and seeking to maximize their present and fu...

LADWP has reduced solar installation subsidies by roughly 30%. This means that homes that already have solar installed should sell for an even larger price premium moving forward. Today, roughly 2,000 LA homes have solar panels. That doesn't strike me to be a large number. For details about ...

The attached chart reveals the substantial numbers of foreclosures present in Riverside, California. Indeed, at 1 in 14 homes, Riverside has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation. Our recent research suggests that inland and coastal communities in California performed very differe...

Climate change is likely to raise the risk of serious wildfires in many areas of the West. When Malibu suffers from such a fire, this makes the national news. I am in Bozeman, Montana and this local newspaper's editorial focuses attention on this issue. "The dog days of summer have set it, bu...

If you want to help a friend or family member purchase a home, should you co-sign the loan? This article will make you think twice before signing on. The article focuses on worst case scenario planning and the unintended risks that the co-signer is exposed to. Here is a reasonable quote. "“T...

The LA Times presents a rosy article arguing in favor of Los Angeles taking steps to recruit a new NFL team to our city. To quote the article; "The unanimous vote gave city leaders a rare chance to seize on a major economic development after years of slashing payrolls, scaling back services an...

During a time of tight budgets, government has an extra incentive to think through what are "good uses" of public funds. Earlier this year, I co-wrote a paper that is discussed in this blog post. David Levinson and I took a new look at how the United States uses revenue collected from gas tax...