Blog Assignment Seven

For this blog post I chose to write about French Family Science, Math, and Technology Center at Ursuline Academy. I went to Ursuline and I saw the creation of this building, which has followed the trend of sustainability. This building was the first schol building in the Southwest to be certified LEED Gold, and it is one of the most environmentally sustainable high schools in the United States.

The building was designed by SmithGroup/F&S Partners of Dallas. The building is incredibly environmentally friendly, and includes perks such as 25% lower energy consumption and 50% lower water consumption than regular high school buildings. They even used recycled materials to construct parts of building, with a total of 44% of the construction materials being recycled. The most memorable parts of the building to me were the walls of windows in all our classrooms, allowing the rooms to be lit by natural light, and the courtyard outside where we would get lunch, which had drought resistant plants, which didn't require much water to thrive, and a feature that collected rainwater. The picture below is one from when I went to that high school. The silver structure is the water collecting structure.
https://www.ursulinedallas.org/ftpimages/316/misc/misc_62660.pdf

Blog Assignment Six

In Dallas County for summer 2013, you should attempt to invest in office space in West Plano. They have a vacancy rate of 6.8%, with an absorption of 1,254,000 SF. This indicates that there is a demand for office space in this area and that demand is growing, so investing would be a good idea. Furthermore, according to information found in a market overview of Texas, the price of the office space has been steadily increasing over the past four years in the Dallas-FortWorth Region. This means that there is demand for this space and that the payoff for investing in this real estate is steadily increasing. 

Also according to a Market Overview of Texas, the average prices of homes selling in 2010 and 2011 have no changed, but there has been a decline of 34% of houses for sale, which indicates that the housing market is not a good place to invest in at the moment. Not only that, but sales have been declining and the amount of homes in inventory that could be sold is increasing. For these reasons investing in the housing market in Dallas is not a good decision at this point in time. 

http://recenter.tamu.edu/mreports/2012/DallasFWArl.pdf

Blog Assignment Five

Not all home foreclosures happen to the less fortunate; in fact, the foreclosure of million dollar homes has become more of a common occurrence after the economy took a turn for the worse. I read an article about a former basketball player Robert Smith. He was injured and eventually ended his basketball career in 2011. After quitting basketball and losing that source of income, he suffered from some financial woes which resulted in him being unable to pay the mortgage on the 1.3 million dollar home in Seattle that he had purchased when playing for the Sonics. For these reasons his house for foreclosed upon. The home sold for around half of what he purchased it for, and he was unwilling to leave the premises at first. This was a form of judicial foreclosure, or foreclosure that is settled through the court system. The bank sold his home when it was foreclosed on, and when he was unwilling to leave his home, the new owners claimed that they would simply let the courts deal with it.

http://offthebench.nbcsports.com/2013/02/22/former-seattle-supersonic-loses-20-million-home-to-foreclosure-refuses-to-leave-video/

http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2013/02/24/robert-swift-seattle-supersonics-foreclosure-eviction/