News About Properties

Developers throw in extras to seal condo deals

With a wave of new condominium units now available in Greater Boston, real estate developers are offering incentives to boost sales and move hard-to-market units.

Developers are often willing to pay closing costs, forgive monthly maintenance fees for a year, or throw in amenities such as free hardwood floors. These incentives are rarely advertised, but buyers, sensing that the leverage in negotiations is shifting in their favor, are bargaining harder for extras.

Buyers angered as developer misses 3 deadlines at idle condo site in Boca

Jackie Badome has four bedrooms, three bathrooms and two grown children. She doesn’t need a big house anymore.

So in 2004 Badome agreed to pay $360,000 for a two-bedroom condominium at Eden, a former apartment complex on Palmetto Park Road and Southwest Fourth Avenue in Boca Raton. She put down 10 percent in cash for the condo that was supposed to be ready in March 2005.

But the developer, West Palm Beach-based Ceebraid-Signal Corp., didn’t deliver, blaming a busy hurricane season for the delay. Ceebraid missed at least two more deadlines and now promises Badome can move in by September — except that construction on the job site stopped months ago.

A New Look and Higher Expectations for a 70’s-Style Building in Midtown

For more than three decades, a 41-story telephone company building adorned with vertical white marble stripes has stood opposite the western edge of Bryant Park. If all goes well next year, that structure, most recently known as the Verizon Building, will more or less disappear.

The building, which sold last year for $505 million, is not being torn down, however. Rather it is to morph into a more contemporary blue-green glass tower that will bear little resemblance to the original.

The recladding is part of a $260 million upgrade of the Verizon Building, at 1095 Avenue of the Americas, between 41st and 42nd Streets, that is intended to capitalize on the growing desirability of the neighborhood surrounding Bryant Park. The new owner, Equity Office Properties Trust, initially intended to spend $188 million on the renovation but ultimately decided that investing even more would enable the building to command top-dollar rents.

Tax traps await homeowners, landlords

Tax time provides an opportunity to cash in many of the rewards of dabbling in last year’s red-hot real estate market — but there are numerous tax traps if you sold a home, refinanced your mortgage or bought an investment property in 2005.

Although the rules are too twisted to explain fully, here’s a brief primer of four common real estate transactions that could leave you vulnerable in an audit:

1 If you sold your home: Most sellers can cash in one of the biggest perks in the tax code. Couples can sell their home for a $500,000 profit without paying a cent of income tax. Single taxpayers can pocket $250,000.

Neighborhood feels impact of growth

As new developments are approved in Manatee County, more longtime residents are certain to feel like Linda Farley.

When Farley bought her home in the Woodlawn subdivision off Erie Road 10 years ago, real estate agents told her the woods around her house were protected because they contained wetlands.

But she learned otherwise after seeing huge oak trees, possibly 100 years old, being wrenched from the ground to make way for a new neighborhood road.

Plagued by debt

Costlier home loans — and more foreclosures — spread to Ohio’s small towns and suburbs

In Ohio, the loans are more common across the state’s farmlands and Appalachian hills, a Dispatch analysis of new federal data shows.

Subprime loans are designed for people who can’t qualify for traditional mortgages because of poor credit, low income or the lack of a down payment — or people who want to borrow more than permitted by conventional standards.