News About Properties

Square Feet – Long List of Commercial Properties Face Distress

For many months now, the commercial real estate industry has been grim about its future, but it has been hard to quantify just how bad things are. The default rate for loans packaged into securities and sold on Wall Street has remained well under 1 percent, yet today that low figure is considered highly misleading.

Now a New York research company, Real Capital Analytics, has compiled data showing that at least $107 billion worth of income-producing property — including hotels, offices, apartment complexes and warehouses — is already in distress or is headed in that direction.

The distress is occurring all across the country, but New York tops the list because of the number of costly high-profile transactions that occurred during the boom years. Real Capital Analytics’ list includes a total of 268 properties in the New York area, with a value of $12 billion, as already or potentially in trouble.

More ways to profit from market downturn

Still shedding tears over your mansion’s declining value and your beaten-down stocks?

Edward Mendlowitz, CPA and partner with the New Brunswick, N.J. accounting firm, WithumSmith Brown, says his wealthy Florida clients have been benefiting from the economic downturn.

How? They’re getting assets out of their taxable estates in a big way.

“We want to make the best of a bad situation,” Mendlowitz says.

HOAs cry foul over foreclosures

Local homeowners’ associations and condo boards say banks are unfairly getting a break on how much back dues they have to pay when they take back a home in foreclosure.

That’s resulted in financial pain for some associations and helped drive others to the brink of collapse.

But bankers say it’s unfair to tag them with all the costs resulting from a bleak housing market and an overwhelmed court system that can take a year or longer to process a foreclosure.

Now both sides are gearing up for a fight in the state legislative session next spring.

Bargains drive up home sales in Palm Beach County [South Florida]

Even as job losses mount and mortgage lending remains tight, South Floridians still are buying homes.

Bargain hunters continue to respond to plunging prices, with October sales of existing homes in Palm Beach County rising 37 percent, to 618 from 450 a year ago, the Florida Association of Realtors said Monday. The median price plummeted 24 percent, to $264,600 from $348,300 last October.

Sales have shot up since July, but that doesn’t mean the region’s nearly 3-year-old housing slump is ending, analysts say.

The October figures reflect home sales contracts signed during the summer, before the financial free-fall on Wall Street. And prices are expected to keep dropping as long as the foreclosure problem persists.

Census details North Port housing excess [South Florida]

Only five cities in the nation built housing at a faster rate than North Port since 2005, according to new U.S. Census data showing just how overheated the city’s housing boom was.

In fact, North Port added more housing in the past eight years than in the 40 after its inception in 1959.

North Port’s fevered participation in the building boom means it will take Sarasota County’s largest municipality longer to recover from the recession than other areas.

University of Central Florida economic expert Sean Snaith calls places like North Port “pockets of pain around the state,” because of their heavy dependence on the building and real estate industries.

Siesta Key resort operator goes after lender

Like practically every major real estate investor in the region, Richard Dear is reeling from the multimillion-dollar decisions he made during the boom.

The Siesta Key vacation rental operator has defaulted on eight loans totaling $10.8 million since June, and sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September for three companies that owe more than $20 million to two banks and a prominent Sarasota hard money lender.

Unlike other real estate investors, however, Dear was not caught completely off guard by the downturn. He tried to sell off most of his assets before the end of the boom. But Dear said that potential buyers either pulled out at the last minute or were unable to come up with the necessary funds.

What really put him under, Dear said, was a sluggish county permitting process that delayed his efforts to rehabilitate more than 70 rental units on Siesta Key, and alleged efforts by his hard-money lender, Stephen Witzer, to run down his business.