At Facebook.com’s new Silicon Valley headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., employees roam the halls with laptops, discuss the company’s newest features from comfy sofas scattered throughout the building and even draw diagrams on the walls on the complex. The building, which was recently renovated for $250 million in a “hacker” style, may provide an inspiring model for new “cool” and “creative” office complexes across the country, Bloomberg News reported. Nondescript properties with tall ceilings and few interior walls are ideal for Internet firms to take over, Bloomberg said, and are becoming increasingly popular in gateway U.S. cities.
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Bloomberg executive Peter Grauer and his wife have purchased the 1931 home of Peter and Julie Cummings in Palm Beach for $6.98 million, according to a warranty deed filed yesterday. The 7,900-square-foot home is located at 201 El Bravo Way in Palm Beach’s Estate Section. Crstina Condon and Carole Koeppel of Sotheby’s International represented the sellers, who had paid $3.72 million for the home in 1999. The home was designed by noted Palm Beach architect John Volk, and was landmarked in 1997. [Palm Beach Daily News]
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Trump pals launch campaign to get him hired in 2012

The decider?

The Donald’s political aspirations may be purely speculative for now, (the closest Trump has come to acknowledging a possible presidential run in 2012 was admitting on “Good Day New York” last week that he is “for the first time… considering” it), but his pals are [more]

The South Florida residential real estate market will not rebound to
previous highs until 2030, according to a Moody’s Economy.com
prediction. The forecast made something of a stir when it appeared deep
in an article on community development districts in Business Week
Monday (see chart on the forecast after the jump). While Moody’s Economy.com was under a contractual obligation not to
release the specific data it had supplied to Bloomberg, it provided The
Real Deal with data that supported a reasonably similar forecast — a
peak to trough price trajectory that tells of a long road ahead for
Florida real estate. 25 Comments

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New housing starts in the U.S. have likely reached a nine-month high, according to a Bloomberg news survey of 74 top economists. The survey showed that housing starts rose about 2.9 percent in August, according to economists’ projections, an improvement many attribute to the lower prices and federal stimulus efforts. This news comes as Standard & Poor’s Supercomposite Index of 15 builders jumped 119 percent through yesterday. Michelle Meyer, an economist with Barclays Capital, said she feels confident that an industry rebound is imminent. “The housing recovery is under way,” Meyer said. “We expect residential investment to add to growth in the third quarter.”

The principal on interest-only mortgages — which let the borrower put off principal payments for years — is coming due now. That means the monthly payments for interest-only mortgage borrowers could jump 20 percent or more, which could mean a wave of defaults in this economy. Steven Kandarian, MetLife’s chief investment officer, told Bloomberg he thinks the worst is yet to come and that the defaults will occur over the next two or three years. [more]