[Excerpt] The more things change, the more they remain the same. For those who have been in the real estate industry for ten years or more, financing real estate transactions at the end of 2007 looked a lot like it did before the capital markets got so creative. But the market took us on a six-month roller coaster ride in 2007 and there’s no certainty the ride is over. What we can say is that increasingly real estate has become a liquid asset that can trade on more than just the underlying fundamentals. And because of that, there really is no return to the way things were.