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Work begins on new senior
community in Hobron area
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Demolition began yesterday as part of a project to convert the Ohana Hobron Hotel into a senior living community managed by Tucson, Ariz.-based The Fountains. A low-rise apartment building on Kaioo Drive next to the hotel was leveled yesterday as the project gets under way.
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A&B to help develop California office space
A&B Properties Inc. has gone into a 50-50 joint venture with a California business to develop a three-story office building in Valencia, Calif., about 30 miles north of Los Angeles.The partnership with Westridge Executive Building LLC will require an investment of $12.3 million. The building will have 64,000 square feet of Class A office space on 4.3 acres of fee-simple land near Westridge, a new residential community in Valencia. Construction is expected to end in December.
A&B Properties, the real estate subsidiary of Alexander & Baldwin Inc., owns 91,000 acres in Hawaii and has an investment portfolio of more than 5 million square feet of leasable retail, office and industrial space on the mainland and in the state.
MAINLAND
Consumer confidence at 9-year low
NEW YORK >> Worries about jobs and the drumbeat of war with Iraq weighed on American consumers' spirits in January, but not as much as many analysts had feared, tempering worries about a second U.S. recession.The Consumer Confidence Index fell to a nine-year low of 79.0 in January from a revised 80.7 in December, the Conference Board, a private business research group, said in a release today.
While the index has now fallen for seven of the past eight months, the drop was more moderate than average forecasts for 78.1.
The drop in confidence, which comes as U.S. troops gather in the Gulf for a potential war with Iraq, was driven entirely by a sharp fall in consumers' expectations for the next six months. By contrast, most consumers reported their present situation had actually improved in the past month.
Low interest rates may stay around
WASHINGTON >> Americans who have been treated to the lowest interest rates in 40 years on home mortgages and many other types of loans should be able to take advantage of those low rates at least until summer, private economists said yesterday.They pointed to turbulence on Wall Street over rising worries about a war with Iraq as a primary reason the Federal Reserve will leave interest rates at a 41-year low.
The Fed's top policy-making group, the Federal Open Market Committee, will hold a two-day meeting today and tomorrow to decide what it should do about interest rates.
JAPAN
Japan Airlines eyes debt schedule
Tokyo >> Japan Airlines System Corp. may ask Mizuho Holdings Inc. and other creditors for more time to pay &YEN116 billion ($977 million) of debt due by 2006 as falling sales compound limits on borrowing."This year or next year we'll have to make some efforts to rearrange the schedule," Toshiyuki Kawarabata, senior director for finance, told Bloomberg News. "We are negotiating with banks and some other financial institutions."
Japan Airlines System is counting the cost of an October merger between Japan Airlines Co. and Japan Air System Co. that created the world's third-biggest airline by sales.The airline can't raise money in the bond market until it files earnings as a combined company for the first time in June, Kawarabata said.
