Bangkok - Thailand's property sector, hard-hit by the global recession and political instability since the last quarter of 2008, has yet to witness the kind of fire sales seen in the Asian crisis of 1997, Jones Lang LaSalle (Thailand) said Wednesday. While the economic slowdown has led to falling office rents in Bangkok, to date there have been few investments in distressed assets largely because owners are not distressed, the international property consultant said in their latest property review.

Washington - The US government proposed more aid to struggling homeowners on Tuesday, while a private group reported that a record housing price collapse in the country may finally be easing. The Treasury Department announced it would help homeowners modify their second mortgages and would make it easier for people that are unable to sell their homes to refinance into government-backed mortgages. President Barack Obama has said he will spend as much as 75 billion dollars to help people stay in their homes.

Munich  - Germany's government has told Hypo Real Estate (HRE), the biggest German casualty of the world financial crash, that it will obtain 90-per-cent control of the bank by way of an equity issue.

HRE disclosed the move in a board statement Friday from its head office in Munich.

Berlin would ask the shareholders at a meeting on June 2 to vote for an increase in equity from just under 700 million euros (925 million dollars) at present to 6.3 billion euros, with the German state pumping in all the new funds.

The liquidity position of the cash-strapped realtor United Ltd is expected to improve, with the company recently raising Rs 1,625 crore at Rs 38.50 per share through qualified institutional placement (QIP) issue. The proceeds from this sale of new shares to qualified institutions will help the country's second-biggest real estate developer repay a part of its more than Rs 8,900-crore debt.

According to domestic institutional investors, the debt-ridden Indian real estate bigwig Unitech Ltd intends raising Rs. 1,250 crore by way of a qualified institutional placement (QIP) of shares, for the repayment of part of its debt of more than Rs. 8,000 crore.

An unnamed company official said that the funds, likely to be raised by the end of this month, would help the company cut its debt by Rs 1,000 crore by June this year.

London, April 7: The owners of the Empire State Building have announced that they are planning to turn the tall skyscraper ‘green’, by investing an additional 20 million dollars to reduce its carbon footprint and energy consumption.

According to a report in the Guardian, the current owners of the 102-storey office block, Wien and Malkin, hope to buck the economic trend by making the building environment friendly and charging higher rents.