Home Properties, Inc.

Home Properties, Inc. is a company that develops, operates, and sometimes acquires apartment communities. It is a self-managed and administered Real Estate Investment Trust and operates in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast Florida markets. Its communities generate returns in profits mainly because of the company’s improvements of their communities and their devotion to their customers.

The company has been in the business of providing housing for families and various communities since 1967. It currently now has 38, 071 apartments – 36,921 of which are owned, 868 are managed, and 282 are being managed for third party operations. Home Properties Inc. remains to be one of the preferred choices of various markets when it comes to housing.

The strategy of its business is to continue managing and improving their housing communities so that their net operation income will increase. It also concentrates on getting apartment communities that give high returns at low replacement costs.

An investment in Home Properties is low in risk but provides high dividends and has very good potential to appreciate through growth internally and externally. It also offers diversification benefits. The business focuses on already stable markets so buying them will cost less than the replacement costs.

The common stocks of Home Properties are traded on the New York Stock Exchange at its current stock price of $53.56. It reached its peak in 2006 and gradually decreased by 2007 but is slowly picking up in 2008. For the past three months starting from May 2008, Home Properties Inc. has been experiencing an upward trend so analysts are recommending holding stocks before doing anything just yet.

Gannett Co., Inc.

Frank Gannet initially made an investment and founded the Gannett Company, Inc. in 1923. The company had its headquarters originally in Rochester, New York until the management decided to move to Arlington County, Virginia in 1986. The Star-Gazette remains as Gannett’s oldest newspaper and is still in circulation. Its headquarters are located in Elmira, New York. Meanwhile, the main office of Gannet is now located at Tysons Corner, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

Gannet Company Inc. is the largest newspaper publisher in the United States based on the total daily circulation of its newspapers. Considered as a publicly-traded media in the US, it has several assets including the USA Weekend which is published weekly and the USA Today, a national newspaper. On the other hand, its most popular non-national newspaper is the Arizona Republic and this is published in Phoenix.

There are other holdings that Gannet owns such as The Enquirer in Cincinnati, The Tennessean in Nashville, The Indianapolis Star, The Des Moines Register, The Courier-Journal which is published in Louisville, The Detroit Free Press as well as The Honolulu Advertiser. Aside from these holdings, Gannet has also acquired properties in digital media which includes ShopLocal and PointRoll.

Today, many critics are against Gannet’s increasing trend regarding outsourcing or using of Asian labor to produce most of its advertisements.