Lakeside Investment Company

Top 3 Essentials of Passive Real Estate Investing

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 17:55:05 -0700

What are the absolute must-haves when considering where to invest your money? It all depends on what your priorities are, how much time and resources you have to spread around, and the ultimate end goal you have in mind.

Checklist: How to know if real estate syndications are a good fit for you

Tue, 02 Apr 2019 20:09:33 -0700

Some people want to get into the real estate investment game, and they mistakenly think they absolutely have to handle all the property management, renovation projects, and transactional work themselves. While yes, there are many people who do enjoy being hands on, many others have discovered the benefits of passively investing in a real estate syndication as a limited parter.

What's the deal with passive real estate investing?

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 19:08:42 -0700

What is the deal with passive real estate investing?

It might be a buzzword, but passive investing is probably the easiest way to get involved in the lucrative world of commercial real estate wheeling and dealing in some of the hottest markets without having to do much of the leg work.

So who is involved in a real estate syndication anyway?

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 18:35:30 -0800

So who are the players involved in a real estate syndication anyway?

If you are new to passive investing through real estate syndications, you may wonder just who all the main players are in the venture. Even some seasoned investors may have not given this much thought. We broke it down with this visual.

Can Indoor Farming Fulfill The Dream Of Opportunity Zones?

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 12:23:14 -0800

Zale Tabakman has developed a concept for an indoor farm that grows greens, herbs and vegetables using modular construction, called Local Grown Salads. One LGS farm would be 15K SF and fabricated off-site almost entirely — even the HVAC system, often one of the costliest elements of construction. All the site needs is for the walls, floor and ceiling to be sealed and the water and power to be connected to the grid.

“It’s like installing a giant washing machine into a building,” Tabakman, who is based in Ontario, Canada, told Bisnow.

Tabakman estimates that without any delays, an LGS unit can be installed in two weeks, with its first harvest possible in 30 days, and each subsequent one 30 days after. Each plant produced will be certified organic, non-GMO and kosher (in order for greens to be kosher, they must never come into contact with insects). Each farm is estimated to cost $2.2M, require 15 to 20 workers and start producing income after 150 days.

Several companies have already introduced urban farming, particularly near some of the most in-demand urban markets such as New York and San Francisco. But whereas many of those farms are in sizable, purpose-built new industrial buildings, LGS has a much smaller capital requirement and can take space in older warehouses that are otherwise obsolete for any industrial use.

Because each LGS unit only requires a 15K SF pad with 14-foot clearance heights, Tabakman believes it is actually better suited to older warehouses than newer buildings with higher ceilings, saying “all that extra space would be wasted.” The model is, in a way, ideally suited as an opportunity zone investment.

To that end, Tabakman is working to launch a qualified opportunity fund called I95 OZF, focusing on the Northeast corridor, from Richmond, Virginia, up to Boston, where space is at a premium and the most dense population in the country has sky-high food needs.

Many of the opportunity zones in cities like...Read More

Hovercraft ferries could be coming to Silicon Valley for your commute

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 16:41:15 -0800

Bay Area commuters may have another way to get to work on the horizon: hovercraft. Especially for those living or working in the South Bay, San Jose and Silicon Valley.

It sounds futuristic, but it's really not. Back in the 1960s, hovercraft ferries used to take commuters from Oakland to San Francisco and back.

"There's a history in the Bay Area of hovercraft back in the day," said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council. In a few years they could be herding tech workers to San Jose and Redwood City.

Hovercraft ferries already serve riders around the world. A delegation of Bay Area business and civic leaders recently traveled to Portsmouth, England to take a ride on one such hovercraft. They came away impressed, inspiring Wunderman to send a letter to the Water Emergency Transportation Authority's board of directors asking the group to study how they might be able to bring hovercraft ferries to the Bay Area. (WETA is the transit agency that operates ferries on the San Francisco Bay.)

Hovercraft are essentially low-flying aircraft that are held up by a cushion of air, like a puck on an air hockey table, explained Felix Sargent, CEO of HOVR, a startup interested in bringing its vessels to the Bay.

As cities grow upward and outward, sprawl and land use become key global issues

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 16:21:04 -0800

The world, we’ve been told, is urbanizing rapidly. But the picture painted by researchers—dense, blocks of high-rises, new towers rising like staircases as cities evolve—obscures the true growth patterns reshaping the globe. Metropolises aren’t simply building up, they’re expanding out, and doing both at unprecedented rates that have serious consequences for the economy and the environment.

“Upward and Outward Growth: Managing Urban Expansion for More Equitable Cities in the Global South,” released yesterday by the World Resource Institute, paints a picture of cities building and ballooning. Researchers examined growth patterns for nearly 500 urban areas, using satellite imagery and radar data to measure growth vertically and horizontally. The results suggest land-use and density may be one of the defining issues of the next few decades.

“Some expansion of cities is inevitable to accommodate urban population growth,” said Anjali Mahendra, co-author of the new paper. “But the type of unmanaged, incessant growth in land area we are seeing not only leads to inequities in access to core urban services, like water, power and sewage, but also to greater economic and environmental risk for the entire city.”

Cities will have tripled in size between 2000 and 2030, and are on track to reach a projection of 80 percent growth in the next 18 years. The need for smart, dense, and sustainable growthis paramount, the report argues. Otherwise, the current state of unmanaged growth in land area will not only creates more inequality, but add to economic and environmental risk.

Many researchers and think tanks have argued that cities can save the environment; groups such as C40, a network of cities collaborating on environmental policies, have released studies showing that cities can combine growth with ambitious efforts to decrease carbon emissions.

Gondola to the Greek? A-BART-ments? Drag show prop? BART wants your ideas for creative reuse of train cars

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0800

A very Bay Area-themed bar? Props for a Hollywood movie? A gondola to the Greek Theater in Berkeley? Or, to the new A’s stadium at Howard Terminal? Or, better yet, train-cars-turned-box-seats for baseball fans?

Maybe all of the above?

Those were just some of the ideas stirring in a Twitterstorm BART spurred last week when it floated the idea of what to do with its old, dysfunctional cars as it makes way for a brand-new fleet. Already, some 45 new train cars have arrived, with about half carrying passengers.

As new cars arrive, they’ll help grow BART’s existing fleet so the agency can run longer trains to carry more passengers, BART staffer Melissa Jordan said in a blog post on the agency’s website. Within the span of two years, BART expects to have 775 new cars on hand, replacing all 669 of its cars that were built in the 70s, 80s and 90s, some of which have been rehabbed, and some not.

Ultimately, the agency hopes to grow that figure even further, bringing the total number of cars to 1,200 cars, so it can run more trains through the Transbay Tube (which will require upgrading its train control system, too).

At some point, though, BART will have to begin retiring its old cars to make room for the new ones. It’ll target its worst-performing cars first by analyzing data on how long each car goes without needing repairs, its condition, how many hours it has operated in service, and time remaining on key components in the car, among other factors.

But then what?

There’s a lot of interest in the old cars, including from train museums and trade...Read More

Where Opportunity Zones stand, heading into 2019

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 11:29:32 -0800

When Trump’s tax overhaul became law a year ago, the real estate industry’s attention was focused on caps to the mortgage-interest deduction, plus state and local tax deductions—which the industry predicted would put the housing market in peril. (It didn’t.)

After the dust settled in the spring, the industry realized a hidden gem had been tucked away in the law: Opportunity Zones. The brainchild of Silicon Valley financier Sean Parker, Opportunity Zones allow investors to obtain massive tax advantages if they invest capital gains—money made on the sale of assets like a home, a business, or a piece of art—into “distressed” areas of the country where the post-financial crisis recovery passed by.

While the provision theoretically allows investors to put money into any type of project so long as it’s in a designated zone—a business, infrastructure, whatever—most observers believe it is especially attractive to real estate developers, partly because the largest tax benefits go to those who stay invested in the zone for at least 10 years. Advocates for the program believe this could be a game-changing community development tool.

Given the horizon for these investments is quite far off, where do things currently stand? Many firms looking to jump into Opportunity Zones were waiting on the Department of Treasury to release a set of guidelines that should clear up questions left open by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was intentionally written to be open-ended, supposedly to allow municipalities to tailor the program to their specific needs.

While the Treasury guidance was mostly inside baseball for financial professionals, it seemed to open the flood gates for activity around Opportunity Zones, as firms announced their intention to jump into the space en masse. The firms interested tend to be private equity firms, which have experience in raising money for long-term financial projects—many of which already specialize...Read More

CALIFORNIA GIVES BART CONTROL OVER DEVELOPMENT AT ITS STATIONS

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:01:54 -0700

The bill empowers the transit agency to zone its properties — an estimated 250 acres of blank asphalt — and limits cities’ ability to delay or obstruct development.

“We can no longer afford to say no to building housing, especially around transit hubs,” said Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco, lead author of AB2923. He and his co-sponsor, Democratic Assemblyman Tim Grayson of Concord, pitched their idea as a sensible solution to two gnawing regional problems: traffic congestion and the housing crisis.

They say BART could replace surface parking spaces with compact parking structures — going vertical instead of sprawling. Supporters said the bill would add 20,000 new homes and ease pressure on jammed freeways.

But the bill ran into resistance from mayors and city councils throughout the East Bay, where most of BART’s parking lots are located. Although many of the detractors professed support for transit-oriented development, they chafed at the idea of BART having authority over land use.

BART recently committed to build out its lots by 2040, producing 20,000 units of housing and 4.5 million square feet of commercial space, including childcare and educational facilities. Supporters of AB2923 say the transit agency needs to move faster than that, to avoid being bogged down in negotiations.

Such negotiations nearly derailed a project in Millbrae, which was approved by a 3-2 City Council vote in March after 10 years of discussion. It promises to bring 400 housing units — a fifth of them affordable to low-income families — plus 150,000 square feet of office space, and 30,000 square feet of retail.