No distressed assets in the market?

So says Sam Zell at a recent conference:

“I’m supposedly the grave dancer, so everybody comes and talks to me and says, ‘Well, when are the opportunities going to come up?’ I answer them by saying that you don’t have opportunities unless there is volume, and there is no volume.

“The only real opportunities that I think exist in the real estate business today are in two areas: one is hotels, which need to be marked to market every night. Even there the recovery in the hotel business is changing the opportunity very rapidly,” Zell emphasized. “The other opportunity, which is a very hard opportunity, is all this crap that’s in all the little banks all over the country.” Those troubled assets will be priced and sold off in a manner similar to the role the Resolution Trust Corp. played in the early 1990s, according to Zell.

Interesting take, but he may be referring to deals of the size he’s used to doing. From his perspective, there’s no point in sifting through your local bank’s REO list for deals. But that doesn’t meant here isn’t for the rest of us.

Here’s a little more on the struggling hotel market. That’s more of a national chain problem, but it’s got to be hitting even the local ones. Eureka occupancy rates seem to be down, and many are for sale – although there are almost always hotels for sale in Eureka, that’s just the nature of the town. I’ve seen mixed news about Northwest Arkansas hotels, with rumors of struggles in Fayetteville and Benton County down if holding steady due to Wal-Mart.