Property managers make money off condos’ insurance

Your property management company may be making money off your condo association’s insurance policy.

Some say that’s a conflict of interest because management companies also help associations pick their insurance.

"Referrals should be based on good service only and not financial incentives," wrote Jerri Franz, a spokeswoman for the Department of Financial Services. On Monday, the department will hold hearings on other perks that insurance agents shouldn’t be allowed to offer, but commission splitting isn’t expected to be among them.

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Family’s gift to aging parents: a condo

The yard work and upkeep Joan and Bob Ebaugh used to enjoy at their Palm Bay home started to become chores they couldn’t keep up with.

Hiring people to take care of the lawn was becoming a financial burden, and Bob Ebaugh’s bad knee made household jobs even more difficult. But trying to sell the home they’d lived in for the past 18 years seemed impossible.

However, unbeknownst to the couple, married 57 years, their three daughters and one son had a plan.

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Cape Coral couple plead guilty in fraud

A Cape Coral couple charged with swindling banks by falsely obtaining mortgages pleaded guilty Wednesday.

Maria Arantegui-Vasconez, 36, and Alfredo Arantegui, 40, each entered guilty pleas to one count of scheming to defraud a financial institution in exchange for sentences of five years probation. Arantegui-Vasconez also was sentenced to two years of prison, suspended, meaning if she completes probation without problems, she won’t go into custody. Both were ordered to pay restitution, but the amount hasn’t been determined.

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Miami’s ‘Condo King’ Perez Perseveres After Losses

Early this year, as Jorge Perez struggled to restructure more than $1.5 billion of debt on mostly vacant Florida condominium projects, doctors discovered a golf ball-sized tumor on his pancreas.

“You understand how vulnerable you are,” Perez, 61, said while sitting in his Miami waterfront office, with a view of the skyline shaped by Related Group of Florida, the real estate company he founded in 1979. “You’re here on a loan and you never know when they’re going to call it.”

Perez, known locally as the “Condo King,” survived the medical scare. In January, after nine hours of surgery to remove the tumor, doctors determined it was benign. Related Group, after absorbing $1 billion in losses, is still standing.

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Homebuyers get creative to close deal

When Efrain Hernandez couldn’t seal a deal before the first-time homebuyer tax credit expired earlier this year, he lost faith he would ever own a house in a market where investors and all-cash buyers are snapping up bargains and mortgages seem hard to come by.

But waiting — even though it wasn’t by choice — got him more than the $8,000 federal tax credit.

In a single day last month, Hernandez negotiated a contract on a five-bedroom, three-bath home in a development near Homestead, Fla. By the end of October, he closed, talking homebuilder Lennar into a $40,000 discount off the list price, getting it to pay $18,000 in closing costs and scoring a $7,500 no-interest loan from Miami-Dade County to lighten his down payment.

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Survey: Iowa farmland values rise 13 percent

Iowa farmland rose in value by 13 percent in the year ending Oct. 1, stimulated by rising corn and soybean prices, according to a survey of bankers by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Iowa farm values rose by 6 percent in the period from July to October, as corn prices shot up from $3.50 to more than $5 per bushel and soybeans climbed from $9 to $13 per bushel.

The Chicago Fed doesn’t put a dollar amount on land values. In September, the Iowa Realtors Land Institute said values of Iowa farms had risen 8.5 percent from the previous September to a statewide average of $4,518 per acre.

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