News
CALLING FOR LAND
April 11, 2012
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| Yesterday, we chatted with Land Interests Inc’s new managing director Mike Howl, who opened the full-service asset management, brokerage, and RE investment advisory firm’s new Walnut Creek office last month as part of a NorCal expansion. The Irvine-based company relocated two people from SoCal to get things rolling. The firm previously had a satellite office in Sacto but wanted to be in the core Bay Area where many of the financial institutions, developers, consultants, and other folks it works with are located. Its commercial assignments are primarily asset management and workouts of retail and industrial assets; right now, his team’s working on the valuation of a broken condo development in the Bay Area and managing an industrial condo project for the receiver, a Land Interests subsidiary. |
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| Mike and team members Angelina Fisher and Mark Forster. On the residential side, people are getting into position for the return of the market. Land Interests brokers are scouting for development and acquisition opportunities—normal market-rate deals vs. bank-owned—and larger-scale transactions vs. small individual projects. "The easy stuff goes first,” he says. (That's also our philosophy on test taking.) Previously in the cycle, all people were looking for were finished lots and ready-to-go development projects. Now folks are looking at land with maybe just a map or some approvals. “Guys are starting to think two or three years down the road, as opposed to what they can build immediately,” he adds. Outside work, Mike enjoys exercise (a different kind of workout), golf, and spending time with his two boys, ages 5 and 7. |
