The Fundamentals of Commercial Real Estate Bankruptcy

BIM-enabled FM is increasingly being adopted by building managers. It extends the value of BIM beyond planning, design, and construction of buildings. And ensures that post-construction facilities and maintenance management is highly efficient and collaborative.

Building affordable housing is not particularly affordable. Costs of construction usually far exceed the revenues generated by rents. Without utilizing highly complex financing tools, often from multiple sources, for developing, preserving, and operating affordable apartments, building affordable housing is often impossible. This topic will help you understand how to effectively utilize available financing tools to develop quality housing for low-income residents. The material also explains the myriad of financing tools available for affordable housing and the complex application procedures for these funding sources. This information is essential for anyone involved in the development or operation of affordable housing and will enhance one's understanding of affordable housing financing tools and the benefits and challenges of each.

Commercial leases often require tenants in a multi-tenant development (such as a shopping center or office building) to pay CAM charges in addition to monthly rent. These lease provisions often are misunderstood or taken for granted by landlords and tenants and, as a result, are frequently violated, knowingly or otherwise. Sophisticated tenants require CAM charges to be "actually paid or incurred" or "expended" by the landlord to be reimbursable, and they are careful to prohibit landlords from passing their overhead on as disguised CAM charges. To guard against this practice, tenants should negotiate (and then review) their leases carefully, require landlords to deliver "reasonably detailed statements" of CAM charges as often as the lease requires, and should scrutinize those statements to ensure that all charges are allowed by the lease. CAM charges often include property management fees. In addition, most leases permit the landlord to estimate CAM charges and force tenants to pay their share of those estimates monthly. Generally, they require the landlord to reconcile or justify the actual CAM charges to its tenant after the end of each year. Commercial landlords that also manage the project themselves often charge tenants, in addition to CAM expenses incurred, an arbitrary, "industry standard" percentage of the rent as "a property management fee," even though the lease does not expressly provide for that, and no third-party management fees are paid or incurred by the landlord. When the CAM charges are based on actual costs, a tenant might want to negotiate a cap on how much they will be required to pay for their share of common area maintenance. Putting a cap on CAM charges helps protect the tenant from their lease expenses increasing outside of their budget or sudden surprises at the beginning of the year. In turn, this adds some risk to the landlord to cover additional expenses themselves. With fixed CAM charges, property owners set a flat fee for common area maintenance and usually add small annual increases to that fee to cover the cost of inflation. Tenants may still want to review the property expenses to ensure their CAM charges aren't significantly higher than they should be. Fixed CAM charges can either apply to property taxes, insurance, and actual maintenance costs or only to maintenance costs while leaving the property taxes and insurance adjustable. Listen as our authoritative panel discusses the best practices in negotiating CAM provisions, what types of provisions to include, and when to choose between a capped or fixed cost CAM provision.

Whether you know it or not, anyone who works in the housing industry is likely impacted by the historical practice of redlining. Redlining is the discriminatory and systemic denial of services to those residing in communities associated with a certain racial or ethnic group. By hindering the economic development in neighborhoods populated by ethnic minorities, redlined areas become underdeveloped and undervalued while their residents become poorer.