creiZ about Real Estate

I recently an article in the Global Real Estate Monitor titles "Counting on rent increases and value-added plays. Firstly, what drew me to the article was the title and the fact that it had value-add plays in it because those of are the types of properties I am looking for. Unfortunately though, it seems that more and more people are starting to use the term to classify many other real estate parcels that are not really value-add plays, but that's a blog post for another day... As I was saying I read through the article and came across the last paragraph, which follows:

“The value play is like a marriage, it’s in the eyes of the beholder,” says David Cohen, the Northeast Regional Director with GE Real Estate’s North America Lending Group in New York. “The sophisticated value-added buyers have some distinctive insight and knowledge, seeing something that somebody else did not, and because of that, they are going to be able to create value over the short or medium term to enhance the asset.”

So now as I reread the paragraph, maybe I understand why the term value-add is being used more often. It's because in the eyes of the seller, it looks like a value-add play. Which really begs the question: Why isn't the seller taking advantage of the value-add opp? Does it really matter? Yes, because if the seller is not interested because they realized that, for example, it was going to be impossible to get a zoning change after they bought the property (which they probably shouldn't have bought in the first place), then that is a good bit of information to know. And when I think about, in this case, the seller shouln't even mention that it is a value add play...

So is anyone out there looking for value-add plays? Or does anyone have any value-add opps? I am mainly interested in ugly value-adds, managing them and finding institutional investors that are looking for value-add plays...