Archive for August 16th, 2007
by David Bodamer August 16th, 2007
One of our sister publications, Direct, has an insightful report about how retailer Bath and Body Works built a file of 10 million email addresses in less than two years.
“By November, we’ll have the largest e-mail file in all of specialty retail,” said Brian Beitler, vice president of customer marketing for Bath and Body Works, at a presentation during eTail 2007 in Washington, DC last week.
A customer’s e-mail address is worth $18 to the company, Beitler added.
To entice customers to give over their electronic addresses, Bath and Body Works offers free tubes of lip gloss. However, they don’t get it on the spot. The company takes a true multi-channel approach.
The gift comes as an offer in customers’ e-mail boxes that they must take back to the store to redeem, Beitler said.
“E-mail is significantly more valuable to us for a store customer than for a Web customer,” he added.
“When they’re in the store the first time, they make a $24 or $25 transaction,” he said. “When they come back to the store, what do they do? They make another $24 or $25 transaction.”
Related Topics: Management & Leasing, News, Retail |
by David Bodamer August 16th, 2007
Real Estate Bloggers noted that funds run by Fidelity Investments, Franklin Resources and Kensington Investment Group all had rough second quarters. The combination of home builders taking a beating, subprime problems and the recent REIT stock decline was a triple whammy.
Property funds, the best performers in 2006, slumped 16 percent since May 14, the most of any category tracked by research firm Morningstar Inc. in Chicago. The $5.9 billion Fidelity Real Estate Investment Portfolio, the largest among the group, fell 19.7 percent. The $718 million Franklin Real Estate Securities Fund and the $500 million Kensington Strategic Realty Fund each dropped 20.3 percent, the most among actively managed property funds with more than $100 million in assets.
House prices will suffer their first annual decline since the 1930s as rising mortgage rates hurt demand, according to the National Association of Realtors in Chicago. Investors pulled $4.5 billion from real estate funds in the past three months after a drop in commercial property shares slashed returns.
“Even though the subprime crisis is mainly hitting residential real estate, commercial is getting pretty hard hit on lower expectations for U.S. growth,” said Brad Durham, managing director of Emerging Portfolio Fund Research.
More at Bloomberg.
Related Topics: Finance, Investment, News, REITs, Retail Real Estate, Trends |
by David Bodamer August 16th, 2007
KKR executives are raising at least $1 billion from investors for an existing KKR-managed hedge fund. The goal is to snap up bargains from some of the $300 billion in junk bonds and high-yield loans weighing on Wall Street banks that have promised financing for a gaggle of mega-LBOs. With many of those bonds and loans expected to be available for a song amid the market distress, KKR figures it can generate a fat profit down the road once the “anxiety in the debt markets” ebbs and the debt rises in value.
So confident is KKR of a sharp rebound in the corporate credit market, it’s telling prospective investors in the KKR Strategic Capital Fund they can expect to reap hefty returns. An August marketing brochure for the new fund-raising drive by the KKR fund states, “Unprecedented opportunity to invest in current corporate credit ‘meltdown’ and earn estimated gross returns in excess of 20%.” The 24-page circular continues, “Opportunity exists due to credit market technical issues, not deterioration in credit fundamentals.”
More at Business Week.
Related Topics: Finance, News |
by David Bodamer August 16th, 2007
Recent disclosures include one by RAIT Financial Trust, a commercially focused REIT, which calculated its exposure to American Home Mortgage Investment Corp., a troubled home-mortgage lender, at $95 million. That amount, if written off, is 7% of RAIT’s book value per share, according to some analysts.
Analysts and investors say they fear there could be more of such revelations coming. UBS REIT analyst Omotayo Okusanya says most commercial-mortgage REITs suffer from poor disclosure and don’t, for instance, break out their loans by industry or highlight their top 10 borrowers. “Unfortunately, you run into a situation where a certain amount of the business is a black box,” he says.
The implosions are happening mainly among residential-mortgage companies such as American Home Mortgage Investment, which filed for bankruptcy protection last week. The situation has been stressful particularly for residential REITs that specialize in loan origination and rely on lines of credit to do so. With the number of bad loans rising, banks are requiring those residential-mortgage REITs to put up additional collateral and are cutting off much-needed lines of credit when they can’t meet margin calls.
More at Real Estate Journal.
Related Topics: Finance, News, REITs, Trends |
Jim Cramer Interviewed at Freakonomics
by David Bodamer August 16th, 2007
The Freaknomics blog has a fun little interview with Jim Cramer.
He starts with the highly viewed clip of Cramer freaking out a couple weeks ago.
There’s lots of other goodies here as well. Interestingly, most of the questions seem to come from young investors.
No Comments Related Topics: Commentary, Finance, News |