Run-down complex will go condo [Central Florida]

Run-down complex will go condo [Central Florida]

Families who thought homeownership was out of their financial reach may have a chance to buy a place for less than half the average price of a new home in Lake County.

The City Commission has agreed to spend $2 million to renovate the run-down Kristen Court apartment complex, which city officials have taken over in hopes of ridding the neighborhood of drugs and crime.

Once the renovations to the 59-unit complex are complete, city officials will put the units up for sale. The selling price for a three-bedroom, one-bathroom condo: $106,000.

“For a new unit, that’s almost unheard of,” said Ken Thomas, Leesburg’s housing and economic-development director.

Towers can’t dig out of hole [Northern California]

Towers can’t dig out of hole [Northern California]

It’s just a hole in the ground near the Sacramento River right now. But to get an idea of what might be built where John Saca tried and failed to erect two 53-story high-rises, look 2,700 miles east to the banks of the Potomac.

That’s where CIM Group, the Los Angeles development firm commissioned to revive the dormant Towers construction site at Third Street and Capitol Mall, has built Waterview, a twin-towered hotel, office and condominium complex outside Washington, D.C.

CIM officials say they view that building as the type they’ll construct on what is now a barren downtown Sacramento site covered in dirt and weeds and the remnants of construction that barely had the chance to begin.

On Tuesday, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, an early investor in developer Saca’s dream, said it had bought out his interest in the struggling project.

Tax Benefit Falls From Favor

Tax Benefit Falls From Favor

Some smaller real-estate investors are turning away from a popular tax-deferral strategy that has attracted scrutiny after fraud allegations.

A number of investors had already started to reject the option out of concern about another problem: high prices for commercial properties.

The so-called 1031 exchange strategy allows participants to defer, or sometimes avoid, paying capital-gains taxes when they sell a business or investment property if they plan to buy another property of equal or greater value. To qualify for the benefit, the seller can’t touch the money from the sale. Instead, the money typically is received and held by a “qualified intermediary”

Glen Burnie family wins the right to return home [Maryland]

Glen Burnie family wins the right to return home [Maryland]

Virtually homeless for the past week, LaDonta Edwards and her three children just want to go home.

Mired in a vicious lawsuit with two business associates she claims perpetrated a “foreclosure rescue scam,” she found four police officers and sheriff’s deputies at her Glen Burnie door May 31 ordering her to leave immediately.

But when Circuit Court Judge William C. Mulford II on Wednesday ordered she could return home next week until her lawsuit is settled, it was bittersweet. As a condition of his order, he said the part-time Transportation Security Administration instructor at BWI-Thurgood Marshall Airport will have to pay the mortgage and bills.

Boca Developers ponders bulk sale at three projects

Boca Developers ponders bulk sale at three projects

Sign of the times: In a bid to unload unsold inventory, Boca Developers is contemplating a bulk sale at three of its projects.

Boca Developers is considering a bulk sale of unsold units at three South Florida projects, in a proposed deal that shows how builders are grappling with the ongoing slowdown in the housing market.

If completed, the deal may also indicate that investors are becoming more interested in placing bets now on South Florida’s beleaguered housing sector in hopes of riding the market up when it recovers.

According to documents obtained by The Miami Herald, New York-based Cabot Investment Properties has signed a letter of intent to pay $168 million for 236 units at Marina Grande in Riviera Beach, Peninsula II in Aventura and Oaks I at Biscayne Landing in North Miami.

Tax relief may work against real estate vultures [Florida]

Tax relief may work against real estate vultures [Florida]

For two years Magdiel Guillemi watched the condominium towers go up across South Florida and waited for his chance to buy in. Now the 25-year-old aluminum company executive thinks his time has arrived.

With the housing market stuck in slow motion, more and more condos nearing completion, and many jittery preconstruction buyers wanting out as closing day approaches, Guillemi’s betting he’ll be able to buy at steep discounts. Then he hopes to sell for a profit, just as flippers did when the market was on the way up a few years ago.

Call it the contrarian view of real estate investing. While the market appears stone-cold to many individual buyers and sellers, others — the so-called vulture investors — see opportunity.