Miami Condo Fiasco

David Sutta of MIAMI (CBS4) covered the story last night. Watch the video here

This is it folks. I got the letter from Related that closing is on June 6th. Pretty sad. 99% chance I will walk. Had an idea to do a reverse auction. More on that later today.

So here’s the update. I got a call from a friend…the same one who told me to buy in the first place. He said someone from the Plaza called him and said the ‘units were moving’ that is to say, they were selling. Hard to believe right? Well, for a whole 32 seconds I [...]

I know it’s been months. My apologies to those faithful readers who were left hanging. The truth is I was just too upset to write about this. The saga continues actually. The deadline is May 26. I got some news about the condo but let me get acclimated to thinking about this topic again. More [...]

I put together a spreadsheet outlining a recovery plan. It is based on a 5.5% 7 year ARM. That means I would have to sell the unit in 2014. According to much I’ve read, that is when the demand will have exceeded supply. It is also based $5000/year taxes, rent at $1200/month for the first [...]

I haven’t updated the blog lately for a couple of reasons. The main one is that this whole thing has taken a toll on me and I needed a break. Time to spend some time with my family and not let this whole thing rent space in my head. The other reason is that the [...]

Those of you who have contributed so far know that when you buy your link I email you my phone number in case you have any issues or just want to chat. Some of my new friends of CF have done exactly that. One of those was James Svoboda. James is an SEO guy in [...]

So maybe I’m not so clever huh? So far, thanks to all my new friends, I’ve been able to raise $887.50. That’s because I sold 25 units. Still have 9,927 to go and time is running out.

Another interesting addition today was the Real Estate Investment Club Directory which lists clubs throughtout the nation. I’ve actually attended a few meetings at some of the local clubs. It’s a great place to meet real estate professionals, stay up on what’s new, learn from the pros, and offer your services.

Interesting that BuyVacationCondos.com bought in today. I was actually wondering how hard it would be to rent out my condo to vacationers. As I was reading about the advantages of vacation condos, it made more and more sense. Because rentals are short term, vacationers pay a premium and the condo remains vacant part of [...]

Bob makes a good point that the developer should seriously consider renegotiating the price of the unit. After all, there are probably tons of people who will simply walk away. Wouldn’t it benefit them to negotiate a more realistic price and guarantee income. I would really like to hear from other unit owners. After the [...]

I will confess that finding something very exciting to write about mortgages is very difficult. But I wanted to say something about LoanNetwork.com, who bought a link from me before yesterday, so I went to their site and read through some of the pages. To get this out of the way, LoanNetwork.com let’s you [...]

Yesterday I drove down to Miami for an interview with Diana Olick. The taping lasted much longer than I had anticipated but I’m not complaining. Diana interviewed three of us. The other two people (Jamal and Barry) had also purchased condos. Barry seemed pretty eager to tell his story even though he was the luckiest [...]

FSBO.com is actually an old time friend. You may remember I posted about FSBO sites and FSBO.com ranked among the top sites to post your property ‘for sale by owner’. There are so many places to post your property for sale that you need to qualify them or risk spending all your time posting [...]

Man, now talk about a cool idea. Picture this scenario, you get invited to a new restaurant with some friends, everybody orders something but you have no idea what to get. So you get what you think you like. When the meals arrive, everybody digs in and is loving it except you. When I [...]