February 20, 2006

Stand in line with 3,600 other dolts. "Win" lottery to buy a condo. Lose your shirt. Welcome to the new reality


Boy, those developers really made people feel lucky to snag a unit, with their waiting lists, the price increases, the pre-construction parties.

Must be a pretty tough pitch though these days.

The Dot-Condo collapse is here. And it gets ugly when everyone rushes to the exits at the exact same time.

Farewell, Condo Cash-Outs

When developers in Arlington, Va., threw a party 18 months ago to showcase plans for Clarendon 1021, a condominium development that had not yet been built, 3,600 prospective buyers stood in line just for the chance to book reservations to bid on the apartments.

Now, less than a year after the building opened, speculators in this and other buildings are putting dozens of units on the market at the same time, causing asking prices and profits to slip.

Of 23 investors who sold since Clarendon 1021 opened last summer, the three most recent sellers actually lost money, after paying all fees, and average profits in the building have declined since August, said Frank Borges LLosa, owner of FranklyRealty.com.

The Great Condo Gold Rush is fading from memory and the Great Sell-Off has begun. "Money Down! Motivated Seller, Want More? Just Ask!" screamed an investor's online advertisement last week for a one-bedroom apartment in Clarendon 1021 that had never been lived in.

This is not the first time that condo markets have been influenced by investors. In the late 1980's, developers converted thousands of condo units in the Northeast and many of them were bought by speculators, said Karl E. Case, an economist at Wellesley College. Many of those investors, he said, ended up losing money when they sold in the early 1990's. "It was ugly," he said.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

These condo "repositioners" (more like lying buzzard dirtbag whores from Hell) are masters at deception and trickery.

Take Montecito Property Co. (Jacksonville Beach, Florida). They went on and on about how hot their conversions were. At Aventura (Scottsdale Cove Apartments) in north Scottsdale, AZ, now four months after their so-called sellout, they are plopping their tacky sign on Shea Blvd. for the public. I guess that their exclusive 500+ backup contracts were not enough to unload all of their cancelled or failed sales. (These contracts were signed after "standing" in line for 25 hours and being ignored or verbally abused by the salespeople.) If you want to learn how to be the most revoltingly rude and offensive, ignorant, stupid and arrogant hack/whore salesperson, you definitely could learn alot from these people. Did they think that the worse they treated someone, the more chances that they would sell their overhyped as-is 15-year-old run down apartments? I guess they were not sadistic enough.

I looked at ziprealty.com and 55 units are for sale in the last 2 months. According to zip, not one of them has resold!! Maybe all those sleasy bastard realtors can have one of their exclusive by-the-pool parties and sell property to one another. It will take the dumbest stump on the forest to pay $1400 to $1500 per month (plus repairs) for a one bedroom that rented for $625/month before the conversion PLUS all the sliding prices in the future when lending is finally tightened up! But then again, there are alot of idiots out there.

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