News about properties and real estate
Taking reservations [Southern California]
Just when investors thought they knew everything about vacation home purchases, along comes a brand-new way to spend lots more money.
Hybrid condo-hotels — luxury hotels whose rooms or suites are sold as condominiums and are available to owners from a week to three months a year — are on their way to California, with 22 projects already announced and more planned.
Liens, delays dog Ceebraid [South Florida]
Creditors seeking payment for everything from ironwork at the Brazilian Court to flight services for a 13-year-old Learjet are dogging Ceebraid-Signal Corp. and companies linked to the West Palm Beach firm or its top executives.
Only last year, Ceebraid-Signal snapped up the Gulfstream Hotel in Lake Worth for $13 million and the Palm Beach Hilton for $42 million.
ince November, liens totaling more than $1.2 million have been filed in Palm Beach County by businesses demanding payment. Some seek reimbursement for work done a year ago. “It would be so simple to make this all go away,” said Todd Van Linda, owner of Van Linda Iron Works, which is seeking $141,000.
Caribbean now a real estate treasure chest
The waterfront has always been the hottest bet in the real estate game and probably always will be.
But a host of factors complicating development of luxury properties here on the mainland are pushing the front to places that many of us have never heard of: Canouan Island, Margarita Island, Rose Island and Great Exuma.
Now, it’s not just salty mariners that the Caribbean is beckoning across its azure waters, it’s Gucci-clad resort developers, Realtors-to-the-stars, bankers and speculators.
Two major ways to prevent real estate probate
Beware of condition that gives up control of home
DEAR BOB: I am recently widowed. The house is now in my name. How do I prevent probate, how expensive is it, and how long before my heirs can sell the house? Should I add my heirs’ names to the title of my house now? –Phyllis L.
DEAR PHYLLIS: Whenever possible, it is best to avoid probate court costs and delays. After your death, it may take six months to a year or longer to convey title if you leave your house and other major assets to your heirs by your will. The probate costs vary widely by the state statutory legal fees involved.
However, if you leave a small estate, many states have probate avoidance exceptions. But a home worth $100,000 or more usually puts you out of this small estate exception.
South Gate — granddaddy of Sarasota subdivisions [South Florida]
Development helped transform sleepy town…
Looking over vast orange groves, two young men debated what the 1,240-acre expanse could look like if their fantasy became a reality.
Despite the odds, Smith and King helped spark Sarasota County’s post-World War II housing boom more than 50 years ago, transforming a sleepy Gulf-front town with unpaved roads into a desired destination for retirees and middle-class families.
Where ‘Buy Low and Sell High’ Are a Co-op’s Fighting Words [New York City]
Morningside Gardens is a rarity in real-estate-mad Manhattan, a co-op apartment complex that middle-class New Yorkers can afford. Apartments sell for a fraction of what they would bring on the open market. For the chance to live free of a crushing mortgage and in a community that is unusually mixed, residents accept a trade-off: they give up the possibility of making a killing when they sell.
But the feverish real estate market is finally testing the convictions of the residents of Morningside Gardens, a cluster of six brick towers on a grassy expanse of the gentrifying borderland between Harlem and Morningside Heights. Later this month, the residents of the nearly 1,000 apartments are scheduled to vote on whether to amend their bylaws to let apartment sale prices triple immediately and be adjusted every year thereafter.