Perched high in the exclusive Southridge community, with panoramic views of the Coachella Valley, including the city of Palm Springs and the San Jacinto Mountains, the 23,366-square-foot home was designed in 1973 by the California Modernist architect John Lautner. It was built to resemble a volcano, with three visorlike arches and an undulating concrete roof, a hole at its center opening a courtyard to the sky. The roofline has been described as one of the most distinctive works of architecture in the Coachella Valley. The house has also been likened to a giant mushroom. Its original wood frame burned down during construction, in a fire sparked by a welder. Work was finally completed in 1980.

Used mostly as a second home and entertaining space by the Hope family, it can accommodate as many as 300 guests for dinner under an enormous covered terrace. Each January for many years, the family threw a huge dinner party to mark the end of the Bob Hope Classic golf tournament, now called the Humana Challenge. “That was sort of a highlight of the desert social calendar,” said Linda Hope, a daughter of the couple.

Mr. Hope died in 2003 at the age of 100; Mrs. Hope died in 2011 at 102. “Mother and Dad would sing together,” Ms. Hope said.

Tony Bennett, Glen Campbell and film starlets would visit the home. A big buffet would be laid out on the terraced patio, including Mrs. Hope’s famous antipasto salad, which she insisted on mixing herself, adding the vinegar and oil by eye. A clear tent was put up on part of the terrace to keep out the cold while still allowing guests to take in the spectacular nighttime view. “The whole desert was at your feet,” Linda Hope said.

The home, which is being listed with Ann Eysenring, a broker with Partners Trust Real Estate of Beverly Hills, and Patrick Jordan and Stewart Smith of Windermere Real Estate in Palm Springs, has 6 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, 3 half baths, indoor and outdoor pools, a pond, putting greens and a tennis court.

Mr. Lautner, the architect, eventually distanced himself from the project after Mrs. Hope hired a designer to make changes to the interior. None of them constituted a major alteration of the Lautner design, which includes a boulder jutting into the living room; she simply made interior modifications to make it “more livable,” according to Linda Hope. The changes included extending the dining room toward a balcony and making it possible to get from the bedrooms to the front door without crossing a patio, Ms. Hope said.

“I think my mother was a frustrated architect,” she added, noting Mrs. Hope’s serial remodeling of their primary home in Toluca Lake, Calif. “My dad used to say every time he went away he needed a road map to get back through his house.”

In Palm Springs, Mrs. Hope commissioned the artist Garth Benton, who painted the murals on the garden walls at the Getty Villa educational center and museum in Malibu, to paint a Rousseau-like mural on the back wall of the bar, and a lush, greenhouse-like wall of plants in the spa, which houses a pool, a hot tub and an exercise area.

It was Mrs. Hope who spent the most time at the Palm Springs house, while her husband traveled extensively, and famously, for work. Each November, Mrs. Hope would travel from Toluca Lake with a caravan of cars to carry the clothes, dishes and silverware she thought she would need for the season. “People used to laugh and say, the court is moving,” Linda Hope joked, adding: “She absolutely adored the place. My dad did, too.” But it wasn’t until her parents were in their late 80s and 90s, she said, that they really spent more time there together.

Bob and Dolores Hope, who were avid golfers, loved the desert, Ms. Hope said. The Lautner-designed house was their third home in Palm Springs and their “dream house.”

This Tuesday (October 23rd), a headline in The New York Times proclaimed: "Across Corn Belt, Farmland Prices Keep Soaring." But a farmland survey released last Friday by the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF), which analyzes returns from land owned by the association's institutional members in third quarter 2012, amply illustrates that the prices for agricultural land aren't uniformly going up.

Altogether, the NCREIF Farmland Index tracks the 541 properties, worth $3.3 billion, owned by its members throughout the US. Of those properties, 120 are operated by institutional owners while the other 421 properties are leased to tenant farmers, says Jeffrey Havsy, NCREIF's director of research in Chicago. The owners of these properties are pension funds, high-net-worth individuals, or even, potentially, sovereign wealth funds, he says. Land operated by agri-business owners is not included in the survey.

The Chicago retail market is having a resurgence based on a number of indicators, including retail vacancies.  In fact, retail vacancy has continued its steady decline since 2010, according to a third quarter CBRE MarketView report on Chicago's retail market.

During the third quarter, the Chicago retail market posted an 8.7 % vacancy rate, a 30 basis point decrease from last quarter, according to CBRE.

"Regional malls have some of the lowest vacancy rates, in the 3% to 4% range," says Mark Hunter, retail market lead for the Midwest at Jones Lang LaSalle in Chicago, although specialty stores' vacancy rates are higher. On Michigan Avenue, one of Chicago's most fashionable shopping districts, on the other hand, vacancy rates are about 3%, he says.

Although vacancies are down in the Chicago market, net asking rents were flat in the third quarter, only rising from $16.76 per square foot in the second quarter to $16.77, according to CBRE's MarketView, which reports the average for the metropolitan area for all type of centers. Asking rents at premium malls' start at $40 per square foot, says Hunter.

Twenty years ago, critics scoffed at the ideas of cell phones and plasma-screen television but today they are common place around the world.  Like those innovations that spawned billion-dollar industries, proponents of vertical farming today say their idea will do the same 50 years from now or sooner.

But critics, like those two decades ago, don't see that happening. Still, it is happening already in several U.S. cities, Canada, Sweden, South Korea and shortly in Shanghai and Singapore. Large populations are necessary for the vertical farming concept to grow.

The vertical farming concept is simple: Instead of trucking food from farms into cities, grow the food closer to the customer. That is done by constructing large vertical greenhouses. The immediate impact, say pro-vertical farmers, will be the elimination of truck fuel exhausts and easier access by customers to fresher food.

The U.S. commercial real estate marketplace will continue to recover in 2013 with modest gains in leasing, rents and pricing, according to PwC US and Urban Land Institute's Emerging Trends in Real Estate Forecast for 2013, presented on October 17th in a webcast delivered from the ULI's annual conference held in Denver. The opinions expressed in the report were derived from over 900 interviews and surveys of commercial real estate leaders. 

According to survey participants, although the real estate recovery is slower than normal, the prospects for all property sectors are better than in 2012. "Recent job creation should be enough to increase absorption and push down vacancy rates in the office, industrial and retail sectors, helped by the limited new supply in commercial markets," according to the report.  Strong demand for apartments is expected to continue in 2013, even as new projects come online. And even the single family home sector is doing better in most regions. The only problems in the housing arena are in the leisure and second home markets.

The US apartment market is making a strong recovery. In fact, in six of the top markets, pricing has recovered to its peak-- reached in December 2007--or gone beyond it, according to Real Capital Analytics' Commercial Property Price Indices for second quarter 2012. The chart appears in RCA's US Capital Trends apartment report for August.   

The most significant thing about RCA's Commercial Property Price Indices, says Dan Fasulo, managing director at RCA, is that the top four markets--Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and Manhattan--are known for high tech and Boston has exceeded its peak pricing by 13%.

Although August can be a sleepy month for commercial real estate, this past August, sales of US apartment properties were $6.4 billion, rivaling May and June as the most active month this year, according to RCA, which only keeps tabs on properties worth $2.5 million or more.

A funny thing has happened to the US office market. Fewer investors seem to be enamored of trophy office buildings in CBDs than in the past.

Whether this is because there are too few of these prize properties available, or the prices are too high and the cap rates too low, according to the Real Capital Analytics' US Capital Trends report for the office market in August, suburban office properties are outshining their city cousins.

Sales of significant office properties in the US, those with price tags of $2.5 million or greater, totaled $5.3 billion in August, according to RCA, slightly below June and July levels but 6 percent higher than a year ago. The report also shows that CBD office sales' volume had fallen for five straight months, while suburban office properties had impressive year-over-year gains.