Author: David Marino
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Demolition and Rezoning: Simultaneously Solving the Office Supply Glut and Affordable Real Estate Shortage
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A fundamental tenet of real estate valuation and development is that land gravitates to the highest and best use. The United States has a residential real estate crisis, where Zillow reported in 2024 that there’s a shortage of approximately 4.5 million housing units.
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By David Marino Commercial real estate is a “learning by doing” business. It is one of the only industries where there is no single class to take, no rule book and essentially no regulation that prepares a commercial real estate professional for lease transactions. Having been in commercial real estate for 35 years, representing tenants […]
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While you can hardly open a business periodical without reading about the meltdown of office space in the United States, until recently, few are talking about the slide of industrial real estate.
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In many real estate transactions, buyers and sellers assess the market value of a property using market comparables, or “comps,” of similar recently sold properties. Within residential real estate, comps are powerful indicators of market value since sales can be accurately compared (“comped”) with similar properties based on square footage, condition, age and other features like the number of bedrooms,…
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In 1954, Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics quickly became a standard textbook for any introductory statistics class, addressing thorny concepts such as random sampling, correlation versus causation and visual misrepresentation through scale manipulation or truncation. The book makes the case that we are all susceptible to being misled if we are not careful about the way we interpret…
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By David Marino Four years post-Covid, most employers and employees are now living the new normal—they are remote, hybrid or distributed, working where they thrive and often coming into the office three or four days a week. Right now, many companies have no formal policy as to days in the office, and most companies are […]
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Three and a half years post-COVID, and it’s universally understood that office commercial real estate is in crisis. Office vacancy rates have gone up 50% nationally due to companies downsizing as their leases expire and they implement remote working and hybrid work models. Yet national average asking rents for office space have not gone down… not by a single percentage…
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When the business community begins to open back up this year, many business owners and executive teams are going to look around at all of their excess space remaining from reductions in force and team members working from home post-Covid and wonder what to do about it. With the business community considering how to rebuild their organizations, there will be anemic demand…
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To understand how Proposition 15 would affect property taxes for commercial real estate, one must first understand how property taxes are assessed today. California commercial and residential property taxes are limited by Proposition 13, whereby property tax is fixed at 1% of the original purchase price, with annual increases thereafter capped at a maximum of 2% per year. Prior to…
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The story of the “canary in the coal mine” is an advanced warning of danger. The metaphor originates from when miners used to carry caged canaries while at work; if the air in the mine became toxic, the canary would die before levels of gas became hazardous to humans. Many of our clients consider Hughes Marino the canary—an alert system…
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The federal government has slipped in a new tax increase on businesses that is going to catch financial executives unprepared and in conflict with their auditors in how to account for it. As of this year, parking expenses for employees, including an amount allocated to parking if not broken out in rent/lease payments, are nondeductible for tax purposes. The applicable…