One Marina is pleased to announce a new sales release of 16 two- and three- bedroom homes. Priced from the high-$400,000s.

The first 100 vistors to One Marina this weekend will receive a $10 voucher to Mobile Gourmet. The Mobile Gourmet gathers together the best gourmet food trucks in the Bay Area in an outdoor bistro-style setting. Click here for a schedule of Mobile Gourmet events and join us this weekend at One Marina.*

Lots of parents have made good money by following this strategy for the four or five or, God forbid, six years their kids spent in college and then selling the condo after graduation. Of course, the longer you can hold onto the property, the better the odds of cashing out for a profit. The other key factor to consider is the tax benefits. Here’s what you need to know.

Deducting college condo ownership expenses
The tax rules generally prevent you from deducting losses incurred from owning and renting out a residence that’s used more than a little bit by you or a member of your immediate family. However, a favorable exception applies when you rent at market rates to a family member who uses the property as his or her principal home. In this case, you can deduct tax losses from the rental activity (subject to the passive loss rules, which I’ll explain later). This beneficial loophole is open for you if you buy a condo and rent it out to your college-going child (and roomies, if any) at market rates.

You can deduct the mortgage interest and real-estate taxes. If you pay mortgage points, you can amortize them over the term of the loan. You can also write off all the other operating expenses—like utilities, insurance, association fees, repairs and maintenance, and so forth. As a bonus, you can depreciate the cost of the building (not the land) over 27.5 years, even while it is (we hope) increasing in value.

So where will your poverty-stricken son or daughter get the money to pay you market rent for the condo? The same place he or she would get the cash to pay for a dorm room or an apartment rented from some third party. In other words, from you! You can give your kid up to $13,000 annually without any adverse federal tax consequences. If you’re married, you and your spouse can together give up to $26,000. Your child can use that money to write you monthly rent checks. Just make sure he or she actually sends the checks and make sure they say they are for rent. Also, it’s best if you open up a separate checking account to handle the rental income and expenses. Taking these simple steps will help keep the IRS off your back if you ever get audited.

Passive loss rules may postpone tax losses
If the condo throws off annual tax losses (which it probably will after counting depreciation deductions), the passive activity loss (PAL) rules generally apply. The fundamental PAL concept goes like this: you can only deduct passive losses to the extent you have passive income from other sources -like positive taxable income from other rental properties you own or gains from selling them. Fortunately, a special exception says you can deduct up to $25,000 of annual passive losses from rental real estate provided: (1) your annual adjusted gross income (before the real estate loss) is under $100,000 and (2) you “actively participate” in the rental activity. Active participation means being energetic enough to at least make management decisions like approving tenants, signing leases, and authorizing repairs. You don’t have to mop the floor or snake out the drains.

If you qualify for this exception, you won’t need any passive income from other sources to claim a deductible rental loss of up to $25,000 annually (your loss probably won’t be that big). Unfortunately, however, if your adjusted gross income (AGI) is between $100,000 and $150,000, the special exception gets proportionately phased out. So at AGI of $125,000, you can deduct no more than $12,500 of passive rental real estate losses each year (half the normal $25,000 maximum). If your AGI exceeds $150,000 and you have no passive income, you can’t currently deduct any rental real estate losses. However, any disallowed losses are carried forward to future tax years, and you’ll be able deduct them when you sell the college condo. All in all, this is not a bad tax outcome–as long as your losses are mostly of the “paper” variety from noncash depreciation write-offs.

Favorable tax rules when you sell
When you sell rental real estate that you’ve owned for over a year, the profit—the difference between sales proceeds and the tax basis of the property after subtracting depreciation—is long-term capital gain. However, part of the gain—the amount equal to your cumulative depreciation write-offs—can be taxed at a maximum federal rate of 25%. The rest of the gain will be taxed at a maximum federal rate of no more than 15% under the current rules (which I hope will be extended to post-2012 years).

Remember those carryover passive losses that we talked about earlier? You get to use them to offset any gain from selling the condo.

by Bill Bischoff
Source: The Wall Street Journal

From California to Florida, many buyers are increasingly competing for the same house. Unlike the bidding wars that typified the go-go years and largely reflected surging sales, today’s are a result of supply shortages.

“It’s a little surprising because we thought bidding wars were done with,” said Andy Aley, who is looking to buy his first home in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. The 31-year-old attorney was outbid this year when he offered up to $23,000 above the $357,000 listing price and agreed to waive inspections and other closing conditions.

Competitive bidding in the current environment isn’t producing huge price increases or leaving sellers with hefty profits, as occurred during the housing boom. Still, the bidding wars caused by tight inventory provide the latest evidence that housing demand is starting to pick up after a six-year-long slump.

An index that measures the number of contracts signed to purchase previously owned homes rose in March to its highest level in nearly two years, up 12.8% from a year ago and 4.1% from February, the National Association of Realtors reported on Thursday.

“We very much believe we’ve hit bottom,” said Ivy Zelman, chief executive of a research firm, who was among the first to warn of a downturn seven years ago. Earlier this week, she raised her home-price forecast for the year, calling for a 1% annual gain, up from a 1% decline.

The Wall Street Journal’s quarterly survey found that the inventory of homes listed for sale declined sharply in all 28 markets tracked. Real-estate agents consider a market balanced when there is a six-month supply of homes for sale. At the height of the housing crisis, in 2008, there was an 11.1-months’ supply. In March, there was a 6.3-months’ supply.

Inventory levels in many markets were at the lowest level in years. At the current pace of sales, it would take just 1.5 months to sell all the homes listed in Sacramento, Calif., and 2.4 months to sell all the homes listed in Phoenix. San Francisco and Washington, D.C., each have 3.4 months of supply, while Miami has 4.1 months of supply.

Other markets have plenty of homes. Chicago, for example, has 9.4 months of supply, while New York’s Long Island has 16.1 months of supply. Even in those markets, the number of houses for sale is edging down.

Increased competition is frustrating buyers and their agents. “We’re writing a record number of offers, but we’re not seeing a record number of closings and that’s because it’s so competitive,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. in Seattle with offices in 14 states.

Nearly 83% of offers that Redfin agents have made on behalf of clients in the San Francisco Bay area this year and 71% in Southern California have had competing bids. Redfin represented a buyer that made the winning bid on a Gaithersburg, Md., home earlier this month after agreeing to adopt the dog of the seller, who was relocating and looking to find a new home for “Buddy,” a white toy poodle.

Inventories are declining for a number of reasons. Some sellers, unwilling to accept prices that are still down from their peak by one-third, are taking their homes off the market in anticipation of higher prices down the road. Meanwhile, investors have been outmaneuvering consumers for the best properties, often making cash offers that are quickly accepted by sellers.

In addition, some economists say that inventory levels are being held artificially low because Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the nation’s biggest banks have been slow to list for sale hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes they currently own. The lenders slowed down foreclosure sales and repossessions after record-keeping abuses surfaced 18 months ago.

The declining inventory of older homes is spurring sales of new homes. New home sales are up 16% so far this year, compared with a year ago, while inventories of new homes fell in March to their lowest level since record keeping began in 1963.

Meritage Homes Corp., a builder based in Scottsdale, Ariz., reported Thursday a 36% increase in orders for the quarter ending in March versus the previous-year period.

Even though bidding wars are pushing prices higher, many homes are still selling for prices far lower than a few years ago. Increased demand is “entirely affordability driven, which tells me there will be strong resistance to price increases” by buyers, says Jeffrey Otteau, president of Otteau Valuation Group, an East Brunswick, N.J., appraisal firm.

Rates are “so low that we can afford a house that was out of our price range before,” said Aarthi Srinivasan, who is looking with her husband for a home around Palo Alto, Calif., one of the country’s hottest real-estate markets.

Ms. Srinivasan says she fears that prices are being bid up too quickly. She says she had her “aha moment” earlier this year while touring a 50-year-old house that needed extensive remodeling. The home, listed at $1.1 million, received nearly 10 offers and eventually went under contract for more than $1.3 million to a buyer who hadn’t even viewed the property.

Rents are rising at a time when mortgage rates have fallen to very low levels. The result is that the monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home is lower than any time since the 1990s. Freddie Mac reported on Thursday that mortgage rates fell to 3.88% for the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage, near its lowest recorded level.

Banks and other mortgage investors owned nearly 450,000 foreclosed properties at the end of March, and another two million mortgages were in some stage of foreclosure.

Inventories could rise, putting more pressure on prices, if the banks and other lenders step up their efforts to sell their properties. Real-estate agents say they aren’t concerned. “There’s an enormous appetite for foreclosures. Release the inventory. It will sell,” said Richard Smith, chief executive of Realogy Corp., which owns the Coldwell Banker and Century 21 real-estate brands.

“There are only so many buyers who are going to be in such a hurry, so we’re hoping it’ll top off soon,” she says. On Monday, they offered to pay more than the $1.2 million list price for a four-bedroom, bank-owned foreclosure. They haven’t found out if they made the top bid.

On the other side of those transactions are sellers like Debbie and Bill Wetherell, who had 17 offers in four days for their four-bedroom home in Danville, Calif. “I was floored. It was so fast, it was surreal,” says Ms. Wetherell. The home sold on Wednesday for $796,000, more than $50,000 above the asking price.

Still, the sale is for nearly $180,000 less than what they paid for the house in 2005. Ms. Wetherell’s husband has commuted to Reno, Nev., for five years and they have decided to relocate.

Housing markets face other headwinds. More than 11 million homeowners owe more than their home is worth. It is a big reason that the “trade-up” market has been stalled. These homeowners can’t sell their current homes, let alone come up with the down payment for their next home.

Mortgage-lending standards remain tough. Real-estate agents say an unusually high share of deals are falling apart because homes won’t appraise at the price that buyers have agreed to pay sellers.

Still, borrowers with stable jobs are looking to make deals. Kelly Pajela-Fu and her husband offered to pay the asking price of $600,000 for a four-bedroom home in Marblehead, Mass., within a day of the property hitting the market.

“We just knew this house would go quickly,” says Ms. Pajela-Fu, a 31-year-old doctor who had lost out on an earlier offer. Their strategy to avoid a bidding war paid off: The sellers accepted their offer before having an open house.

By Nick Timiraos
Source: The Wall Street Journal 

Fill ’er up: Arquitectonica is designing the 115-unit project that will fill a former gas station site.

Developer Brian Spiers is teaming up with basketball legend Magic Johnson’s Canyon Johnson Urban Funds on a 115-unit housing project on Upper Market Street that will likely be under construction this spring.

The San Francisco project at 1998 Market St., the site of a defunct gas station, is being designed by Arquitectonica and is one of the few Bay Area developments being built as condominiums, rather than rental units. The hard construction costs will be $35.5 million. Spiers bought the site in 2006 for about $10 million. Canyon Johnson and Spiers are finalizing a construction loan with Wells Fargo.

“We have paid for and pulled our site permit, demolition permit, and filed our foundation plan,” said Spiers. “We believe construction will start within 30 days.”

The project is the first large housing development that was entitled as part of the city’s Market Octavia plan, a rezoning that allowed for higher housing density along Upper Market Street and along the Octavia Boulevard parcels that were freed up when the Central Freeway was torn down nearly a decade ago.

In addition to 1998 Market St., Spiers and Canyon Johnson are going forward with 1600 Market St., a 24-unit project, which will satisfy the affordable housing requirement for the 1998 Market project. Under the city’s affordable housing ordinance, 15 percent of a project’s units must be affordable to low- to moderate-income households, a requirement that rises to 20 percent if a developer chooses to build the affordable portion off-site. Both parcels of land were transferred into a joint venture with Spiers and Canyon Johnson. Cahill is the general contractor on both projects. Forum Design is the architect on the affordable development.

Marti Page, a vice president with Canyon Johnson, said they had been “scouring the San Francisco market for the right project in the right location with the right developer.”

“We got comfortable with the project because there is no other product like it,” said Page. “It is striking from an architectural standpoint and unique because it’s for-sale condos on an exciting Market Street corridor.”

Chris Foley of Polaris Group, who helped entitle the project, is doing marketing and sales on the development.

The units will include a mix of small one-bedrooms targeting first-time home buyers and larger penthouses. Pricing has not been set.

“We anticipate hitting the market at a time when there will be very limited new product out there, especially in established neighborhoods such as we are in. Nobody has come out and said they are going condo — everybody else is going rental,” said Spiers, who grew up in the Sunset District.

Spiers and Page said Arquitectonica’s curtain-wall glass design would stand out in a neighborhood where most new construction has been boxy stucco architecture with bay windows.

“You see modern curtain-wall buildings like this downtown and in Mission Bay, but you don’t see them in neighborhoods like ours on Market Street,” said Spiers.

The project is across the street from Prado Group’s 80-unit rental project, which will include a Whole Foods market on the ground floor and soon begin construction.

The building, which sits on a sloped site, will have 5,800 square feet of ground-floor retail and two public roof decks on the ninth floor. Construction will take 18 months and the sales office will open in 12 to 14 months.

“It’s tremendously satisfying — I am happy we were able to keep the design intact,” said Spiers. “San Francisco needs more distinctive architecture and design than we have seen, especially along important streets like Market Street.”

By: J.K. Dineen
Source: San Francisco Business Times 

According to a report from Polaris Group, about 466 new condo units were available in 11 projects in Oakland and Emeryville in March — a 24.6 percent increase compared with the same month in 2011.

Projects such as BayRock Residential’s Eight Orchids, Holliday Development’s Pacific Cannery Lofts and Brog Properties’ Marquee Lofts have been on the market for more than three years and have yet to sell out.

Still, some sellers are optimistic. Mike Ghielmetti, president of Signature Development Group, is returning units to the condo market that were converted to rental in 2008, including 31 units in 288 Third and 91 units in Broadway Grand, both in Oakland. The developer has sold eight units in 288 Third since restarting sales six weeks ago and is about to start selling Broadway Grand.

“People are ready,” Ghielmetti said. “It’s been five and seven years since there was a lot of activity.”

In 2011, only one new project came on the market: Canyon Johnson Urban Fund’s Uptown Place, an 88-unit project at 630 Thomas Berkley Way. The only other new inventory was repositioned projects such as iStar Financial’s 250 units in Bridgewater at 6400 Christie Ave. in Emeryville.

“The new condominium development sales market appears to be stabilizing,” the Polaris Group report states. “Conditions for new-home developers and sellers of existing homes are far from favorable, though, as buyers remain opportunistic and price sensitive.”

Signature’s projects are being marketed by Pacific Marketing Associates, which is sponsoring Passport Oakland — a month-long campaign to rouse Oakland condo buyers that kicked off April 5.

“It’s trying to paint a bigger picture of what Oakland is,” Ghielmetti said. “When people are looking to buy a condo, they are in essence buying a lifestyle.”

The campaign highlights Oakland’s restaurants, entertainment and public transit. Another component is educating would-be buyers on securing a mortgage, which has been a roadblock.

“Our market would probably double if credit were more realistic,” Ghielmetti said.
Paul Zeger, principal, president and CEO of Pacific Marketing, said waht is different now is that buyers have more confidence.

“Two years ago, nobody saw the economy leveling off and continuing to grow,” he said.
Today, potential buyers are more eager, prices remain low and no new projects are under construction.

By: Bianca Torres
Source: San Francisco Business Times 

One Marina is pleased to announce a new sales release of 32 two- and three-bedroom homes with updated floorplans. Join us on Saturday, March 31st at 10:30am for the best selection. We encourage you to get pre-qualified with one of our preferred lenders in advance. Our two- and three-bedroom townhome style condominiums include two-car garages. Two-bedroom homes priced from the high-$400,000s.

Enjoy a video tour of one of our model homes.

The homes at One Marina surround a marina and are adjacent to wetland trails, open space preserves and serene estuaries. Just minutes from downtown Redwood City and offering easy access to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, One Marina is ideally situated.
One Marina

The Smart Corner residential building at Park Boulevard and C Street. Photo courtesy of Smart Corner.

Condo sales in downtown San Diego heated up in 2011, and if sales numbers at downtown’s Smart Corner condo building are any indication, they may be getting hotter this year.

The owners of the downtown residential project, who leased many of the Smart Corner condos because of weak demand during the recession, returned to selling in January. Since then, they have completed 63 transactions, mainly studios. Roughly half of the building’s 301 units were already sold before January’s sale campaign.

“Late in 2011 the ownership group decided market conditions were right,” said Rhonda Slavik, director of Polaris Group, Smart Corner’s exclusive listing agent for the property’s unsold homes. “They wanted to finish selling the building. Since then, they started having renters moved out to launch the sales efforts.”

The Smart Corner condo building is part of a larger mixed-use project at Park Boulevard and C Street. The residential building opened in 2007 and was marketed as a the epitome of urban living: condos that are accessible to mass transit and walkable to commercial spots.

Then economic conditions tanked, real estate prices plummeted and the owners of Smart Corner struggled to sell units.

Since then, economic conditions have eased and first-time homebuyers along with investors, many carrying cash, have been chasing deals in the county and throughout California. Total condo resales in downtown San Diego rose more than 11 percent in 2011 from 2010, increasing from 750 to 837. The price during that time period fell 1.2 percent to $330,000.

Before Smart Corner hit the market, expected prices for their condos ranged $266,00 to $979,900. Prices in 2012: $98,000 to $550,000.

“We saw first-time buyers, a number of renters who decided to purchase and people who live downtown…a lot of empty nesters,” said Slavik, referring to Smart Corner’s buyers this year.

Smart Corner has wrapped up its first phase of sales this year, mainly studios, and is scheduled to sell two-bedroom, two-bath units on March 31. Those start at $259,000. The summer will mark the release of one-bedroom units that start at $159,000.

By Lily Leung
Source: UT San Diego

Twenty-two people, including employees of Facebook, Zynga, Google and Pixar, battled for the home. The winning offer was $1.5 million—40% higher than the asking price. The house had a great view, but it was only 1,800 square feet and came with an old kitchen which, like most of the interior, was covered in 1970s plywood paneling. Seen from the curb, there’s hardly any house at all—just a one-car garage and gate leading to small front courtyard.

The inconspicuousness was part of the attraction, said Jasmin Arneja, 42, who bought the two-bedroom house with her husband Gagan, 40, a software engineer at a networking start-up. “It’s the antithesis to these outrageous bizarre Gordon Gekko-esque houses. It just incorporates so much of our values,” said Ms. Arneja, who runs a philanthropic advisory firm.

Housing prices in the San Francisco Bay area are once again soaring, thanks to an infusion of cash from the rising shares of Apple and Google and the initial public offerings by Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp and soon Facebook, expected to be the largest in Internet history. But while a previous generation of dot-com executives opted for mansions in wealthy San Francisco neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and tony Silicon Valley suburbs like Atherton, this generation is gravitating to modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city.

Ground zero of the current tech-fueled real-estate boom is the Mission, formerly a majority Hispanic neighborhood on the southern edge of San Francisco that’s close to the main arteries that link San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Median home prices in the Mission grew 44% in December compared with a year earlier. Adjacent Noe Valley had a rise of 31% over that same period, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors. The average number of days homes sat on the market in both neighborhoods has almost halved over the past year.

That’s in sharp contrast to what’s happening nationally, where the housing market continues to flounder, with the Case-Shiller 20-City index down for the fourth straight month in a row. It’s even an aberration from the San Francisco area (including Oakland), which saw a 5.4% drop in home prices in December from a year earlier.

Real-estate agents say it’s a cultural shift. The new generation of Internet executives—younger than the last generation of dot-commers—eschews the trappings and responsibilities of expensive properties. They want to bicycle, walk or take public transportation. They like living near food trucks and dive bars.

“You can spend a lot of money on a great restaurant here or just $5 on a burrito,” said Christian Niles, 31, who bought a two-bedroom apartment for $585,000 in the Mission with his wife in August because he saw real estate as a good place to store the cash he’d made from selling his app called TrackerBot to Pivotal Labs last summer. He plans to never own a car.

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp bought a 2,900-square-foot loft penthouse with four bathrooms and a patio for $3 million this past summer in the South of Market area. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams bought a $2.4 million house in Noe Valley in 2009.

The hottest properties are near corporate shuttle bus stops—where employees for companies like Google, Facebook, Genentech, LinkedIn and Apple line up daily for the ride to Silicon Valley. Real-estate agent Amanda Jones calls it the “Shuttle Effect” and said proximity can command as much as a 20% premium. Some real-estate agents said they’re dying for a map of where the buses pick up. “When a listing gets deluged with people—that tells me it’s close to a stop,” said Ms. Jones.

Some companies share a few of the same stops, occasionally leading to employees getting on the wrong bus. Discussions can get animated about adding or moving a stop, said Jessica Herrera, Facebook’s transportation coordinator who controls the stop locations for Facebook’s eight shuttle busses, including a new glass-topped double-decker the company rented to make space for the growing crowds. “Everybody wants a stop that’s next to their house that comes every five minutes,” she said, adding that discussions have remained civil.

Stephanie Pocino, 28, makes the 45-minute trip to Facebook every day from her rented apartment building in the Mission. She has no garbage disposal and no dishwasher, but the Victorian building has lots of charm and bay windows. She carries a wireless Internet card, which she uses to answer emails and work on presentations while on the commute, and her laundry, which she gets done free at the company’s headquarters.

Soaring rental prices—up more than 10% in the Mission and Noe Valley in the past six months alone—are also making buying more competitive, said Vanguard Properties broker Craig Waddle. He’s seen bidding competitions for rentals and rental offers coming in higher than the asking prices. At an open house for a one-bedroom offered for $1,400 a month, 40 people were filling out applications on the spot. One person walked up to the owner, offered $1,700 and got the place.

“It’s been kind of shocking,” said Raj Gajwani, 36, who has been looking for a house in Noe Valley for around $1.5 million for the past few months. A founder of two online companies, he and his wife are expecting twins and want a house close to a shuttle-bus stop for his wife’s commute but with “culture, interesting people and activities.” They also want something they will be able to sell for more money in five years, when they might have to move to the suburbs for better schools.

Mike Shaw, a real-estate agent who has worked for 15 years in the San Francisco market, said buyers often want something already renovated or vintage because they don’t have the time or the interest to hire designers and architects. “That person in jeans and a sweatshirt could be low on the totem pole or a multibillionaire. They haven’t realized the value of good design either in architecture or fashion,” said Suzanne Tucker, a San Francisco designer who has remodeled many of the most lavish homes in the Bay Area.

Buyers argue they have a different sensibility. Ms. Arneja, who snagged the sought-after house in Noe Valley, said she was drawn to the interior, which is covered almost entirely by dark redwood and brick, lending it a feel that lands somewhere between a den and a tree house. “This is clearly a ’70s house,” said Ms. Arneja. “I would like to think of it as a shining example of good architecture during a bad period of design.”

Pop-up restaurants with long lines, coffee shops that brew one cup at a time and shops selling curiosities like local honey have followed the influx of cash. Apple employee Amandeep Jawa, who takes the company bus to work, covered the driveway of his Victorian with a “parklet,” a public space registered with the city featuring seating and greenery. His crowning achievement: a topiary triceratops, dubbed Trixie, made of succulent plants.

But the gentrification is far from complete. A surge in violence between feuding gangs called the Norteños and Sureños claimed two lives in less than 24 hours in the Mission in August, and there was a shooting in front of a coffee shop. Noe Valley saw a rash of sexual assaults; residents there have also reported attempted carjackings and armed robberies.

“The key word is coexistence,” said David Campos, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors representing the Mission and Bernal Heights.

Blogs popular with tech workers keep track of the violence, and one UC Berkeley student produced a map called “Gangs and Cupcakes,” which overlaid Norteño and Sureño territory with the Mission’s most popular cupcake cafes. In recent years, somebody spray-painted “cafe gentrification” on the sidewalk in front of popular coffee shops.

The high prices and the changes in the neighborhood are only going to intensify, predicted Lawrence Coburn, 42, who first moved to the Mission in 1999 to found a start-up and has lived in an 1,100-foot rental loft there since 2003. “A lot of my friends are trying to hustle to buy a place before all the Facebook people get liquid,” he said.

Investor Michael Barton, 48, recently decided to buy because he wanted to lock in his investment before Facebook’s IPO money hits town. The area around his 950-square-foot, two-story loft is “kind of funky, and gritty and dodgy,” said Mr. Barton. But an industrial building next door has been taken over by Internet start-ups. “You can tell there is an upsurge going on here,” he said.

By Nancy Keates and Geoffrey A. Fowler
Source: Wall Street Journal