From dot-com to dot-condo, I sure got some serious deja-vu goin' on right about now... First the banking and subprime implosion horrifically underway, then you have HP favorite bubble-sign condoflip.com going out of business last week. What's next - Bob Toll and Angelo Mozilo getting arrested?
Real estate game ends at CondoFlip - CondoFlip.com is dead.
Created in 2004 to take advantage of investor demand for Miami area residential condos, the site has shuttered, with plans to be rebranded as Condo Super Center.
Mark Zilbert created and built the site as a flipper's marketplace, a venue where buyers could post units for resale before the condos were completed.
But the push to invest in pre-construction units has wound down. An over-supply of units has prompted buyers to sit back and see if prices fall.
Miami's skyline saw a record numbers of new units. Over 10 years, from 1995 to 2005, fewer than 10,000 residential units were completed, city development data shows. But from September 2005 to September 2006, more than 6,000 units were completed.
The last batch of numbers from the city's planning department listed more than 22,000 units under construction. Nearly 30,000 more units were approved but had not broken ground.
And then there's this bolt of honesty (paying attention Greg Swann?) today on condoflip.com:
How Did The Market Change in 2004 and Beyond? We saw a dramatic shift in how preconstruction condos were bought and sold. The condo boom was driven by overly-ambitious speculators, many of whom had been successful in flipping condos in the past. As condo inventories grew and prices rose many speculators realized that further purchasing was increasingly risky. So, buyers just stopped buying.
What Kinds of Results Did Condo Flip See? We saw thousands of sellers, and very few buyers. It didn't make sense for us to maintain a marketplace where there were few buyers. But, we learned much from this transitioning marketplace, and we are actually very keen on what we see coming next.
