It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Two construction companies have filed lawsuits to foreclose on $3.5 million in construction liens placed on the unfinished Mandarin Oriental hotel and residential complex in downtown Boca Raton. The lawsuits follows five other complaints filed in the past two months by unhappy preconstruction buyers of the promised luxury condo. Some Mandarin Oriental condominium buyers, who have waited years to see their promised luxury residence completed, are fed up. ‘It’s pretty devastating,’ buyer Frank Scala said. Scala said he and his wife sold a large home and hoped to move into their luxury Mandarin Oriental condo in 2022. Since then, the Scalas been living in a rental apartment, hoping their condo’s construction would wrap up. Now they’re done waiting, and they want their $1.3 million deposit back. ‘We weren’t expecting this to continue to drag on,’ Scala said. ‘It’s been a real thorn in our sides.’”
“A narrow decision by Indian Rocks Beach city commissioners likely sets up an expensive legal fight over short-term vacation rentals, vacation homes available for rent on sites like AirBNB and VRBO. The city is currently being sued by the owners of many short-term rentals in seven separate federal lawsuits. ‘Traffic, trash, crowds, noise,’ said Dave Watt, one homeowner. ‘And I could give you a litany of all the problems that I’ve had in my place — and I’ve owned since 1957 — including a guy that my neighbor witnessed urinating in my yard at 1 o’clock last Sunday afternoon,’ added another, Marti Krajnik.”
“The Fox Run Community in Corcoran, CA is still sitting empty months after families were expecting to move in. The struggle to turn power on continues in the tight knit town’s latest housing development. Major Developer D.R. Horton built over 40 brand new homes and they are ready to move in. But, PG&E has yet to secure easements, or agreements to set up power lines. For the affected families, the empty homes now feel like empty promises. ‘It’s unfortunate for these families, and it’s unfortunate because they don’t care who’s at fault. These families just want these companies to make it right for them and give them their keys,’ explained Corcoran realtor Reina Madrid.”
“On a recent summer morning, a caravan of unmarked state police vehicles and white hazmat trucks crept past strip malls and wide intersections, making its way toward a pair of modest homes in a remote suburb north of Los Angeles. But there was no shootout. Just a tense half-hour as a phalanx of two dozen state police officers—agents from the Department of Cannabis Control (DCC)—kept snipers trained on the house, waiting for the second of two suspects to emerge. When agents serve a warrant, they often find human trafficking victims, automatic weapons, booby traps, and, increasingly, banned toxic pesticides smuggled from China. Working and middle-class families migrate to bedroom communities such as Lancaster, where you can still find a single-family home with a backyard for about $500,000—about half the median price in Los Angeles, according to Redfin. You may find one for even less if a grower has been busted and is offloading at a discount.”
“Like meth houses of decades past, there are residential grows too damaged to flip. But it’s the moderate ones, the ones that are at risk of selling at a discount to families, that Mike Katz, a Lancaster code enforcement officer who heads the city’s cannabis unit, said keep him up at night. If public safety officials don’t discover a grow before property owners start hiding the damage, it’s often too late. ‘There is no roadmap,’ Katz said. ‘These sociopaths are buying and selling these houses.’”
“A handful of Madison Avenue condominiums located in a luxury high-rise building near the Empire State building have wound up in bankruptcy and will be sold in Chapter 11. The residences include five penthouses, five non-penthouse residential units and two commercial units, according to developer Madison 33 Owner LLC, which filed Chapter 11 on Monday. The business sought court protection months after an affiliate behind a former residence once dubbed ‘Le Penthouse’ did the same to halt a foreclosure sale. The condos join a handful of notable residential properties that have ended up in Chapter 11 in recent years. A bankrupt Los Angeles mega mansion called ‘The One’ was sold in Chapter 11 for $141 million in 2022. Last year, natural gas tycoon Charif Souki put his sprawling Colorado ranch into bankruptcy amid a fight with lenders.”
“The once-booming life sciences leasing market in Greater Boston slowed dramatically just as dozens of speculative projects were under construction, leaving a huge amount of vacancy that could put developers at risk of losing their buildings. ‘We fully expect lenders to become more involved and take control of certain projects over the next year to two. That is going to happen,’ JLL Executive Managing Director Bob Richards said. ‘There just is not enough demand right now to support the amount of vacancy in the market. This is the most dramatic correction in the history of life science real estate in the United States,’ Richards added.”
“Colorado Gov. Jared Polis dismissed anger over Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua taking over apartment buildings in the Denver suburb of Aurora, calling it ‘imagination’ — despite video footage, police reports and the city’s mayor confirming it’s happening. Polis’ press office offered the snarky statement Wednesday night in response to Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky — who told The Post the gang’s takeovers are tied to his policies. ‘According to police intelligence this purported invasion is largely a feature of Danielle Jurinsky’s imagination, ‘Shelby Wieman, a spokesperson for the Dem governor, told The Post.”
“Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, told Fox News on Thursday that ‘there are several buildings’ that have ‘fallen to these Venezuelan gangs’ in his city. Coffman said he believes the buildings were used as taxpayer-funded migrant housing, which is what gave the gangs a foothold. The Post exposed the gang’s takeover of apartments in Aurora and identified the area’s ‘shot-caller’ Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirino, who is known as ‘Galleta,’ or cookie in English. Pacheco-Chirino alongside his fellow gangsters brutally beat a man at an apartment complex in Aurora. He was later arrested and then let go on bail.”
“A homeless man, only identifying himself as Kyle, agreed to speak to CTV News and admits living in an encampment can be chaotic. Tents, furniture, a filing cabinet, a BBQ, racks of clothing, a metal ice tub and needles are littered behind Kyle in a wooded encampment behind Crawford Avenue. ‘It looks like a (expletive) nightmare,’ he admits while holding drug paraphernalia in his hand. ‘I spent all winter out here,’ he explained, after being evicted from his home last August. According to a new survey, 1,400 encampments were identified in Ontario last year. The City of Windsor reported two encampments during the survey year, but now, the city estimates there are between eight and 10 encampments.”
“52 Unsworth Ave., Toronto. Asking price: $2,898,000 (July, 2024). Previous asking price: $2,995,000 (June, 2024). Selling price: $2,825,000 (July, 2024). In June, this four-bedroom house was among several properties up for sale in the area near Yonge Street and Lawrence Avenue. It received two offers over a period of weeks, but neither one was acceptable to the sellers. The asking price was reduced by $97,000. Those efforts clicked, and a buyer worked out a deal for $2,825,000. ‘It’s so important to learn to pivot, and look at what’s working and what isn’t working,’ said agent Andrew Ipekian. ‘If your competitor is at a [similar] price and they’re not selling either, someone will do a price drop. It might as well be you, so you can steal the buyer and get off the market.’”
“Walk down Commercial Road as night draws in and look up at the residential tower blocks that crowd in, canyon-like. How many have their lights on as residents busy themselves with food and leisure? Not many – in some blocks, barely 10 per cent. Try it on any block in Zone 1 and 2 and draw your own conclusion. Mine is that few of these ‘units’ are regularly occupied. They count towards London’s housing targets, but few are actually lived in by Londoners. As research from 2020 by the Greater London Authority found, this ‘is the area of prime interest to the most discerning of international buyers and developments are designed, built and priced accordingly.’”
“In the jargon, many properties appear to be ‘safety deposit boxes’ for foreign investors. Let’s not be shy about this phenomenon. Developers are quite open about it. They say they need to sell units ‘off plan’ in order to help finance the development, and selling off plan often means through their offices in Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore or Bangkok. So if an investor buys a property and that helps to get the development moving, regardless of whether the property then stays empty or not, that’s just how our warped housing market works. We’ve become numbed to it.”
“Nearly half of market funds see net loss of up to 68%. Commercial real estate-backed offshore property market funds are registering rapid losses, hamstrung by sustained high borrowing costs, an industry-wide slump and post-pandemic high vacancy rates, market watchers said Thursday. Further clouding the market is the plummeting value of the once-hyped underlying assets in the U.S. and Europe. Korea’s Igis Asset Management, Meritz Alternative Investment Management and Hyundai Investment Asset Management managed to recover less than half of their initial investments earlier this year, after the property owners defaulted on their loans. According to Korea Fund Ratings, over 1.5 trillion won ($1.1 billion) in publicly organized offshore real estate funds registered a net loss as of Wednesday, 43.5 percent of the 2.43 trillion won total.”
“Similarly, a fund operated by Kiwoom Asset Management saw up to a 72 percent drop in valuation, Aug. 2. The product was designed to track the value of Queens Tower, a building in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Propelling the steep decline was a 34 percent decrease in the value of the building to 85.2 million euros from 129.73 million euros, the figure at the time of the purchase. About 60 percent of the total was leveraged, accelerating the depreciation. ‘Rollovers and maturity extensions are ways for the fund operators to kick the can down the road, so to speak. The risk can be delayed only temporarily, not eliminated permanently,’ according to Standard Chartered Bank Korea analyst Hong Dong-hee.”
“Three more Auckland housing developments to have sewage trucked away and then that’s it, says Watercare. The Herald revealed last week that sewage from 300 new homes in West Auckland was going into holding tanks and then trucked to a wastewater pump station because there was no permanent wastewater infrastructure. At Cardinal West, a 470-home development on a former dairy farm at Red Hills, tankers have been making about 90 trips a week since 2022 to remove sewage from 300 homes to the Massey North wastewater pump station.”
“When the Herald visited Cardinal West last week, residents complained about the odours coming from four ‘tank farms’ at the development on the urban-rural fringe in West Auckland. ‘It’s like Rotorua but a little bit more potent. It smells like poo,’ said one woman, who rents a house with her partner and three children across the road from one of four ‘tank farms’ at Cardinal West. Another resident described the situation as not so bad in winter but summer is potentially going to be really bad with the heat and the stench. Waitakere councillor Ken Turner said Cardinal West pointed to the naive political belief that delivering more houses solves Auckland’s problems. ‘We must slow down intensification until our infrastructure has caught up. Tankering wastewater by road is just the old-fashioned night cart going door to door, ‘ he said.”
“When Australian investors tipped millions into a large investment fund, they probably didn’t expect it would go towards an event with boxer Floyd Mayweather or a penthouse for the wife of a property developer whose fortunes are tied to the fund. But that’s exactly what the corporate watchdog has alleged. Those are some of what the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) claims are questionable transactions entangling the $480 million Shield Master Fund. The fund is linked to property developer Paul Chiodo, the man behind a series of lavish resort proposals from Australia to Italy, as well as numerous local residential projects.”
“Last month, the ABC spoke to three women who allege they were pressured into switching super funds by a Queensland call centre after being offered a free review. Two claim they were cold called. A financial advice firm that partners with the call centre then recommended two of the women invest in Shield. One Victorian woman, Louise, said she eventually invested about $100,000 in Shield after receiving financial advice it would help her be better off. ‘You could earn quite a substantial bit more (the advice showed),’ she said. ‘The thing that was selling it to me most was having being reassured that a financial adviser would be …. keeping an eye on things.’ She’s one of many who’ve poured money into Shield, drawn in by its massive marketing machine. ‘I’m seriously worried that I’m going to lose it,’ she said.”
“Sahar Ghaly has almost $100,000 invested in Shield. The 56-year-old is a family violence survivor who runs a charity and was hoping the switch would lead to a more comfortable retirement. Right now, she feels anything but comfortable. ‘I’m disgusted,’ Ms Ghaly said. ‘As a working woman who’s trying to make ends meet and often sometimes runs out of money before my payday, I just feel really appalled.’ Victorian woman Louise has a similar amount invested. Unlike others the ABC has spoken to she didn’t feel pressured — but is now reconsidering her investment. ‘It’s gut wrenching,’ she said. ‘I’m a single woman, I don’t have anyone else … I need every cent that’s going to be there.’”