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8:30 AM EST, Thursday, March 15, 2007: My commercial real estate syndicates continue to kick tushy. There are several reasons:

1. Commercial real estate is in short supply in many places. Look around Manhattan. There is endless construction is residential spec, not office spec. Ditto for much of the country. Think of all those houses that were built during the recent residential boom. All those people have to work somewhere.

2. Rents continue to explode. If you're in finance, you need to be in town where you can entertain your well-heeled clients. You'd better have nice digs.

3. Interest rates are low. Buildings can be leveraged nicely.

4. Big portfolio owners are selling off big collections. Some syndicators are finding beauty in size.

5. Some syndicators shine.

I received this email from one of my syndicators yesterday:

Fund I status update:
We have received preliminary bids for the Fund I entity and are pleased to announce that the amounts have exceeded our target pricing. Thus, we intend to select a buyer shortly and proceed with a sale. The closing is expected to occur by July and generate Fund level returns of approximately 50% (IRR).

Fund II status update:
Fund II equity is currently fully allocated across 12 assets. We recently put one property under contract for sale at a significant premium over our basis. The decision to sell follows an aggressive leasing program which has increased occupancy from 80% to 93% (with another lease underway to increase to 97%). A sale is expected to occur in October 2007 and generate asset level returns in excess of 25% (IRR).

Fund III – Update & Second Closing Reminder:
Fund III has purchased its first asset, a property in south San Francisco. In addition, we are under contract to purchase a national portfolio of assets (similar to the transaction that we executed in Fund II) in May.

The Colby DVD player at Amazon. My son was watching a DVD on our $30 Cyberhome DVD player when it erupted in flames and died. I replaced it yesterday with the higher-rated Colby DVD-224 compact DVD player from Amazon for $28.99. Big spender, me.

If you're interested, click here. I don't believe there's any reason to spend more on a brand-name machine (like Panasonic). This one plays all the formats, including DVDs, CDs, MP3s, etc.

Reader Ray Pichulo writes helpful stuff

Hi Harry,
I always enjoy reading your column. It's become part of my morning routine. Please don't stop. :-)

Regarding the piece you wrote in Monday's column about the MS Intellimouse 4.0. Did you know that the Intellimouse software is a freebie download on Microsoft's web site? Even if you don't have the Microsoft mouse you wrote about, you can still do the same functions with another non Microsoft mouse for whatever hardware it has. For example I have a scrolling mouse, and can use all the Intellimouse driver functions for the left/right buttons and the scroll wheel, like deletions by clicking it. Can't scroll side-to-side though. Download site for the driver, click here. Make sure you use Internet Explorer, when visiting Microsoft sites. Firefox won't work -- unless you use the Internet Explorer plug-in. See last Thursday's column. Click here.

Regarding Apple's future plans for a solid state laptop, (last Friday's column), we don't need to wait for Apple. Sandisk has announced a 32 GB flash disk that replaces a 2.5 inch SATA disk, like the one in most of today's laptops.

The article itself points out the obvious advantage of the drive is higher performance: Sandisk says that a notebook equipped with the SSD can boot about 50% faster than a notebook with a regular hard drive and data transfers are up to 100 times faster. The drive consumes substantially less power than a regular hard drive. According to Sandisk, the SSD's (Solid State Drive) power savings could translate into an additional 30 to 45 minutes of running time. The manufacturer also says that these SSDs are more reliable.

All these advantage come at a price: While you can buy a 160 GB 2.5" drive today for about $150, and a 200 GB version for around $250, Sandisk has begun selling the 32 GB SSD in "large volumes" for $350. You and I can't buy it yet. The whole story is here:

Go buy a Mac:
My partner calls from Colorado in desperation. His Windows laptop has crashed, again, and won't do anything. We try to fix it on the phone, but he doesn't have the recovery disks. He left them at his other home. So he takes them to a local bearded geek who's still in his pajamas at 3:00 in the afternoon. (I don't make this stuff up.) The Windows registry is "corrupted." The backup registry is only accessible through an administrator password that no one knows. Last night, I FedEx him a replacement hard drive, which may, God willing, work. I ask about the geek. Turns out he loves working on Windows machines. They give him an endless income from desperate users, who don't back up their machines. For his own personal use, however, he has a Mac.

My friend Dan Good has both Macs and PCs. His main machine is a Mac. I asked him questions relating to his Macs:

Q: Have you ever had to reboot your Mac because it locked up?
A: No.

Q: Have you ever had to reload software in your Mac because it stopped functioning?
A: No.

Q: Have you ever had viruses or spyware on your Mac?
A: No.

Q: Have you ever had to clean your Mac of viruses and spyware?
A: No.

Q: Have you ever had to reformat your Mac’s hard disk and load software from scratch, starting with the operating system?
A: No. Did lose a hard drive, however, when it stopped working. It's mechanical, after all.

Q: Does your Mac slow down the more software it runs simultaneously?
A: Yes, before I had more memory.

Q: How much memory do you now have in your Mac? How much can it take?
A: 2 gigs. 4 gigs.

Tennis on ESPN2 is on again. Federer is not playing. He got chucked out in the second round.

Blind man jokes.
My favorite was the cartoon of a blind man wearing a sandwich board and holding a tin cup for begging in one hand and a white stick in the other.

On the sandwich board was written, "I am blind. And I think I may also be black."

My second favorite blind man joke is:

The blind man and the blondes
A blind man wanders into an all girls biker bar by mistake. He finds his way to a bar stool and orders some coffee. After sitting there for a while, he yells to the waiter, "Hey, you wanna hear a blonde joke?"

The bar immediately falls absolutely silent. In a very deep, husky voice, the woman next to him says, "Before you tell that joke, sir, I think it is only fair -- given that you are blind -- that you should know five things:

1. The bartender is a blonde girl with a baseball bat.

2. The bouncer is a blonde girl.

3. I'm a 6 foot tall, 175 lb. blonde woman with a black belt in karate.

4. The woman sitting next to me is blonde and a professional weightlifter.

5. The lady to your right is blonde and a professional wrestler.

Now, think about it seriously, Mister. Do you still wanna tell that joke?"

The blind man thinks for a second, shakes his head, and mutters, "No, not if I'm gonna have to explain it five times."

This column is about my personal search for the perfect investment. I don't give investment advice. For that you have to be registered with regulatory authorities, which I am not. I am a reporter and an investor. I make my daily column -- Monday through Friday -- freely available for three reasons: Writing is good for sorting things out in my brain. Second, the column is research for a book I'm writing called "In Search of the Perfect Investment." Third, I encourage my readers to send me their ideas, concerns and experiences. That way we can all learn together. My email address is . You can't click on my email address. You have to re-type it . This protects me from software scanning the Internet for email addresses to spam. I have no role in choosing the Google ads. Thus I cannot endorse any, though some look mighty interesting. If you click on a link, Google may send me money. Please note I'm not suggesting you do. That money, if there is any, may help pay Claire's law school tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click here and here.
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