Frequently, homeowners in trouble with the banks are willing to sell their homes to private buyers at a discount to marketvalue in order to preserve what little equity they have left.
On valuation, people always seem to be overly enamored with marketvalue, which has puzzled me because as a private company, there is no liquid market on which to buy and sell shares, so a valuation is established without any degree of market efficiency.
With Clear Channel's stock trading well below its buyout value, lenders to the private equity consortium now face the prospect of lending far more than the current marketvalue of the target company, and at a time when banks are already nervous about making loans.
The Plaza Group claims in bankruptcy filings that it was undone by recent accounting rules that force private equity partnerships to write down the value of their investments in accordance with market valuations, as opposed to holding them at cost.
Many families took advantage of the right to buy their council house at 30% of its marketvalue - at least two-thirds of the Becontree estate was sold to the private sector.
Instead he would let private investors make those funding choices, recognizing that successful companies produce commodities that consumers want to buy at fair marketvalue.