You Can Buy A Château For Nothing, Because Nobody Wants Them!

A report from Local 10. “Deadlines are looming for hundreds of thousands of South Florida condominium owners. ‘We can’t afford it, we’re gonna go broke,’ a local condo owner said. Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez, R-Miami-Dade said said there will be no reprieve on the deadline or life-safety requirements. This tough love stance is echoed across the aisle by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Jason Pizzo of Broward. ‘When our kids are born, we start saving for college,’ Pizzo said. ‘When there is a maintenance issue with our cars, we take care of it and save for it. But for an entire generation, people did not put money away.'”

ITV News on Florida. “I travelled to Tampa to meet some of the people trying to rebuild their homes and their lives. What I found were families in despair. Ashley Pangborn, her husband Greg and their two children live in Homosassa. They had just finished repairs when Hurricane Helene struck and their house was flooded again. ‘We were planning on putting our house on the market on October 1. We had our pod loaded up with stuff we saved last year. The hurricane hit and we lost all of that. We can’t sell our house anymore. We can’t move,’ Ashley told me. ‘Do you regret moving here?’ I asked the couple. ‘For sure…this has been a nightmare,’ Greg replied.”

“Even though Florida is America’s flattest state, almost completely surrounded by water, 80% of residents do not have flood insurance which must be bought separately from home insurance. ‘I don’t know what I own anymore,’ says one exhausted woman who had bought her home just three months prior to the hurricanes, and is now faced with an uncertain future. During my time here, what became apparent to me was that for many Florida is now a paradise lost.”

KHQ Non Stop Local. “Homeowners across Washington are experiencing significant challenges as tens of thousands face cancellations or non-renewals of their home insurance policies each year. Britney Inglis, a resident of Nine Mile Falls, experienced the impact firsthand when her home insurance policy was not renewed in January, following the Elk and Oregon Road fires in neighboring Spokane County. ‘We’ve gone through now six insurance companies that have offered coverage and by the end of the month are cancelling policies due to fire danger,’ she said. Inglis, who is also a realtor, highlighted the broader implications for the housing market. She noted that without insurance, buyers struggle to secure financing, and sellers face difficulties, especially in the manufactured and mobile home industry. ‘Especially in the manufactured and mobile home industry we are seeing that where a lot of the insurance companies are refusing to cover that period and that’s impacting those sales because they’ll sit on the market for years to come,’ Inglis explained.”

Orange County Register in California. “Over the past year, OC has seen a small rebound in population with about 10,000 more residents. That’s a reversal of the trend from 2020 to 2022 when the county saw about 40,000 people leave. In 1999, the median home price in OC was $275,000. Now it’s at $1.45 million, 60% higher than the statewide median home price, according to the report. ‘We are losing people to our neighbors,’ Jon Gould, UC Irvine School of Social Ecology dean said. ‘We’ve spent a lot of money educating them and we are pushing them away.'”

ABC 30 in California. “Andy Krotik has been a North Valley realtor for 35 years. He expects to see more homes coming onto the market in 2025 but can only hope more people are ready to buy. ‘The challenge that I see, I should say, is the minimum sales price of a home in Merced County,’ he said. ‘The median is like $420,000. You can’t even find houses for sale under $300,000. It’s not there, and so affordability is a challenge.’ The presence of UC Merced continues to draw interest from people in the market for rental units. ‘I still get investors from the Bay Area — they’re cash buyers,’ Krotic said.”

From AM New York. “A local business owner was convicted Thursday of defrauding taxpayer-funded mortgage lenders out of millions of dollars in a years-long scheme involving fraudulent short sales of distressed properties. Queens resident Avraham Tarshish, 40, now faces up to 30 years in prison after a Brooklyn jury found him guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, as well as related wire fraud charges. Authorities said the Brooklyn business owner and his four co-conspirators manipulated short sale transactions, which allow distressed homeowners to sell properties for less than the mortgage owed, typically with the lender agreeing to forgive the remaining balance. The scheme involved artificially deflating property values and immediately reselling the homes at much higher prices.”

“False documents were provided to mortgage lenders, concealing payments to homeowners and side agreements to flip properties at inflated prices. Many affected loans were insured by the Federal Housing Administration or backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, entities funded by taxpayers.”

From ABC News. “Throughout the country, once bustling business districts have turned into ghost towns. The pandemic has shown that many jobs can be done remotely. Now some major U.S. cities are breathing new life into empty office buildings by converting them into housing. Notable cities that are part of this trend include New York, Austin, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Boston. David Greaney and his firm Synergy are buying them up, at a deep discount. Synergy currently owns 35 properties in the Greater Boston area. Working out of one of the same buildings Greaney recently bought, small business owners and brothers Michael and Emilio Ruggeri are betting on a comeback for Boston’s downtown. ‘I’m an eternal optimist,’ said Michael Ruggeri. ‘The buildings are way too expensive to just stay empty. Someone’s going to take over the space, so we’re hopeful.'”

Wall Street Journal. “The prospect of transforming unused office space into much-needed housing seemed a logical way to resolve both issues. But few conversions moved forward because the cost of acquiring even an aging office building remained too high for the economics to pencil out. landlords began to capitulate and dump buildings at enormous discounts to peak values. One of the first projects planned by the venture of Dune and TF Cornerstone likely will be the Wanamaker Building in Philadelphia. TF Cornerstone just purchased the debt on the office space in the building and is in the process of taking title. ‘The banks are foreclosing and doing short sales,’ said Daniel Neidich, Dune’s CEO. ‘There’s a ton of it going on.'”

“Miki Naftali, who has converted more than five New York properties over the years, said he has been very actively looking at conversion candidates but hasn’t yet found a deal that works financially. One of the issues facing converters is that even if an office building is dying, it often has a few existing tenants who would need to be relocated. Some buildings would need atriums to ensure that all the apartments have sufficient light and air. ‘When you start to add everything up, if your costs get close to new construction, that’s when you get to the point that it doesn’t make financial sense,’ Naftali said.”

The Associated Press on Michigan. “Two towers at Detroit’s iconic Renaissance Center would be razed and the complex converted to a mix of housing and offices under an ambitious $1.6 billion plan announced Monday. The complex, which next year will lose the headquarters of owner General Motors Co., is the symbol of Detroit, with aerial views often shown on television sports broadcasts. GM decided last spring to leave what’s locally known as the ‘RenCen’ for a more modern building being constructed downtown. GM said in April it would join forces with the Bedrock real estate development firm and Wayne County to turn the partially vacant property into a roughly 27-acre entertainment complex across the Detroit River from Windsor, Ontario. Demolishing the two 39-story towers would free land for the waterfront project that would complement a walkway along the river, Bedrock said in a press release.”

The Globe and Mail in Canada. “188 Redpath Ave., No. 707, Toronto. Asking price: $599,000 (June, 2024). Previous asking price: $695,000 (April, 2024). Selling price: $590,500 (August, 2024). In a boutique building near Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue, this one-bedroom plus den unit was unable to get an offer while it was listed for $725,000 last year or when asking $699,000 this year. In March, the owner noticed a smaller unit one floor below fetch $507,000 and recruited the agent that helped sell it. The price was reset to $695,000 in April and then $599,000 in June. After seven weeks, one visitor negotiated a $590,500 deal. ‘There were similar units, all around the same price of $699,000 or $650,000, and unfortunately, we listed during a period when there was a lot of inventory,’ said agent Dino Capocci. ‘We know condos are not flying off the shelf, so it was a case of a lot of work, adjusting the price and eventually getting it sold.'”

CBC News in Canada. “A disgraced real-estate lawyer who this week admitted to pilfering millions in client money to support her and her family’s lavish lifestyle was handcuffed in a Toronto courtroom Friday afternoon and marched out by a constable to serve a 20-day sentence for contempt of court, as her husband and mother watched. Singa Bui ‘consistently ignored orders of the court and complied only when faced with a warrant for her arrest or a threat of incarceration,’ Ontario Superior Court Justice William Chalmers said in sending her off to jail. It’s the latest chapter in the saga of the high-living lawyer couple whose now-defunct firm, Cartel & Bui LLP, embezzled nearly $7 million from home-buyers and sellers in southern Ontario before the scheme came crashing to a halt last year.”

“Cartel and Bui ‘breached their fiduciary duty, and as lawyers, those are the people that we’re supposed to trust,’ said plaintiff Nancy Marsilla of Richmond Hill, Ont., who is out $220,000 that the firm had been holding on to after the sale of her former home in 2021 while she settled her divorce. Marsilla attended court Friday to serve legal documents on Bui before she was taken away to jail. ‘It’s really disturbing that lawyers can get away with that. And it took so long — since 2014, I can’t believe it,’ she said. Bui said she took ‘an amount that I cannot quantify at this time’ to fund ‘unprofitable’ business ventures by her and her husband. Bui’s description reads like a Ponzi scheme: ‘I would then try to replace that money with funds received from subsequent real estate transactions. Over time, it became increasingly difficult to keep up with the repayments, and I was in more and more debt, requiring a constant flow of new client funds to pay off the debt.'”

Business Insider. “Three years ago, when Mark Goff and Phillip Engel had their first viewing of Château Avensac in the south of France, only one thing prevented the California couple from putting in an offer: Was it old enough? The main building — a 48-room château with sweeping views of the Gers, the rural, foie-gras-producing region of southwest France — was rebuilt in the 1820s. The place was certainly big enough to host weddings and artist retreats, a business the couple was counting on to help pay for the extensive renovations that would be required. By the fall of 2021, Château Avensac was theirs for $1.2 million. That’s when reality set in.”

“Everywhere they looked, there was something in need of work. So far, they’ve spent $500,000 updating the château’s electricity, heat, and plumbing, fortifying the foundations, and replacing the roof. They’ve budgeted for $500,000 more. ‘Everyone said, ‘You have to assume everything is going to be double what you expect.’ And they were kind of right,’ Engel says. ‘We didn’t really listen to that part.'”

“All across France, there’s a glut of châteaus for sale. While the average asking price is $2 million, smaller châteaus can go for a couple hundred thousand. A few, like the palatial mansion nicknamed the ‘Little Versailles of the Pyrenees,’ are even being given away. But there’s a reason they’re on the market: The properties are huge money pits. ‘You can buy a château in France for nothing,’ says one real estate agent. ‘There’s a reason for that: because nobody wants them!'”

The Daily Telegraph in Australia. “The price guidance on the Dulwich Hill investment property listing of Anthony Albanese was tweaked midweek to $1.75m, as the Prime Minister seeks to meet the falling property market. The three-bedroom townhouse had $1.9m guidance on its early September listing. But it also emerged the first couple had spotted a luxury Copacabana house in late September, which they secured for $4.3m – down from its $4,650,000 sale in 2021. The clifftop home is now up for $1900-a-week rental. His redundant Dulwich Hill property was pulled on auction-eve on October 11, with the one serious buyer apparently ‘being a bit cute with the price.’ The marketing got its first amended price guide of $1.85m after it had been pulled from auction.”

South China Morning Post. “Chen Zhuolin sold nine units in Hamburg Villa, valued at HK$213 million (US$27.3 million), for about HK$90 million Chen Zhuolin, the chairman of distressed mainland Chinese developer Agile Group, has sold all nine units he owned in a Hong Kong luxury residential project at less than half the original investment six years ago. The 62-year-old tycoon sold the units in Hamburg Villa on Eastbourne Road in Kowloon Tong, which were valued at HK$213 million (US$27.3 million), earlier this month, according to an agent from Centaline Property. The flats were sold at discounts between 53 per cent and 63 per cent. Chen was only able to recover about HK$90 million, an aggregate discount of 58 per cent, according to agents and Land Registry records.”

“The fire sales show the slump in China’s property market over the past four years has eroded the personal fortunes of local and mainland real estate tycoons, such as Hui Ka-yan, the founder of China Evergrande Group. Other high-profile casualties include the family of Ho Shung-pun and the family of late shop king Tang Shing-bor. Hong Kong’s lived-in home prices dropped by 1.7 per cent in September, taking the 12-month decline to 12.5 per cent – the lowest since August 2016.”