Real Estate

WASHINGTON / Bloomberg U.S. construction spending fell in February by the largest amount in three months. Weakness in nonresidential construction and government offset the strongest month for home construction in more than eight years. Construction spending fell 0.5 percent in February following a 2.1 percent January gain, the Commerce Department reported. Spending declines on construction of factories, communication facilities and ...

Bloomberg Sales of U.S. vacation homes tumbled last year from record levels as buyers were held back by tight inventory and turbulence in financial markets. An estimated 920,000 vacation properties changed hands, down almost 19 percent from a high in 2014, according to a survey released on Wednesday from the National Association of Realtors. By comparison, sales of primary owner-occupied ...

EMIRATES BUSINESS Hilton Worldwide on Wednesday announced the signing of a management agreement with Universal Management Group to open the mid-market Hilton Garden Inn Doha C Ring Road. Set to open in 2018, the hotel is located in Qatar’s capital, Doha and once open will join Hilton Garden Inn hotels already operating in the UAE and KSA. “As one of ...

EMIRATES BUSINESS Preferred Hotels & Resorts, the world’s largest global provider of sales, marketing and distribution services to independent luxury hotels, has announced that room nights from outbound business originating from the Middle East region increased by 21% in 2015, when compared with 2014. According to Preferred Hotels & Resorts boking data, the UK, France, Turkey, USA and Spain were ...

Bloomberg Beijing Homelink Real Estate Brokerage Co. is raising about $1 billion to expand its reach across China, according to people familiar with the matter. The company, which focuses on rental and second-hand real estate transactions, has attracted funding from Chinese Internet giants including Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc., said the people, who requested not to be named because ...

Bloomberg Home buyers in hot housing markets from San Francisco to Brooklyn have grown accustomed to bidding wars, waived home inspections, and rapid-fire offers. If you’re house-hunting in Omaha, Neb., Grand Rapids, Mich., or Indianapolis, you might want to brace yourself for similar tactics. Those cities and several others saw sharp declines in the number of homes for sale over ...

Bloomberg Egypt’s government has set a new timeline for the completion of public and middle-income housing units, according to a cabinet statement. The statement went on to say the government has committed to delivering about 300,000 units by the end of 2016. Cairo also plans to deliver about 750,000 housing units by the end of 2018, in addition to the ...

Bloomberg US-based Hill International has won two contracts to provide construction services on real estate and tourism development projects in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. In Saudi Arabia, Hill has been awarded a contract from the local DUR Hospitality to provide services during the construction of the Diplomatic Quarter Marriott Hotel in Riyadh. Hill says its two-year contact has an estimated ...

Bloomberg U.S. apartment vacancies climbed in the first quarter as a flood of newly built units hit the market, slowing the rate of rent increases. Effective rents, or what tenants pay after landlord concessions, rose 4.5 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, down from 5 percent growth at the end of 2015, Reis Inc. said. The vacancy ...

Bloomberg Norway will let its sovereign wealth fund raise real estate holdings by about $17 billion, while rejecting a proposal to expand into infrastructure projects. The upper limit on real estate investments for the $850 billion fund, the world’s biggest, should be raised to 7 percent from 5 percent, the Finance Ministry said on Tuesday. The real estate assets will ...