Bargain Hunting for Condos
Miami: Vultures circling
In housing markets across the country, the reassuring refrain goes a little something like this: At least it's not as bad as Miami. Nowhere has the real estate slowdown hit as hard as it has here. At the height of the boom, speculators gorged on condos, lining up for lotteries and flipping paper units. Then, in 2005, the market turned, and the buyers vanished.
But now the vultures are circling - almost literally.
Peter Zalewski's year-old firm, Condo Vultures, tracks units that stall on the market for more than 100 days and shed at least 10 percent or $100,000 in price. His database now lists more than 1,400 condos.
Zalewski recently let Fortune tag along as he sized up a vacant two-bedroom penthouse in a 35-story tower overlooking Biscayne Bay. With $10,000 in monthly costs, the seller - an investor who failed to flip - has already cut his price from $1.2 million to $849,000. Besides the hefty discount, the unit has one of Zalewski's favorite features: an unfinished concrete floor. "It tells you the seller is desperate," he says
there's more at: money.cnn.com |
