Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] interesting article on the effect of regulation on real estate prices.

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 3/6/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Jonathan King wrote:
>
> I'm sure this kind of knowledge allows some people to become
> multi-millionaires.  Knowing how to predict real estate values is a good
> skill to have.

The difficulty here is that lots of people are speculating (in the
mental and financial sense) on the same things, so that it gets really
tough to "get ahead" in the game.  I've got some fairly decent ideas
about how valuable various parcels of land around Columbia will
become, but in most cases, either I know what other people can
reasonably guess (so my knowledge is built into the price) or else
what I know is sufficiently far in the future that I'd be carrying
around otherwise fairly useless property for years or decades.

This is why it's great to be somebody like Kroenke, who has enough
money to make more money more safely than other local investors.  Some
may recall that when it was becoming time to re-do the Biscayne Mall,
Kroenke wanted to put the Super Wal*Mart and stuff on a new exit from
I-70 on ~100 acres of land he owned.  In one sense, that was a pretty
silly idea since you just can't get something as major as an
interstate exit to appear within the relatively short timeframe he
had.  If many other developers had tried this stunt, they would have
been completely crushed.  But in Kroenke's case, the SuperWal*Mart
goes up across from HyVee on another parcel of land he happens to own,
while his larger and more important parcel will likely one day be
developed to become something even hiigher up on the food chain, when
the highway situation gets sorted out.  Not a bad break at all.

In fairness, though, he ended up having to concede waaaay more than he
would have liked to get that Super*Walmart and the one down on
Grindstone built.  I think the next big Kroenke development fight will
be over whatever it is that he decides to put on the increasingly vast
chunk of land he controls on the corner of Providence and Broadway
where Osco used to be (and where Office Depot still is, at the
moment).  I can predict this, of course, but its tough to make any
money on this knowledge.

jking

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