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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tradelite who wrote (49548)	3/6/2006 11:51:43 AM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

It sure didn't take that long in the DC area. I sold some of those condo conversions in the '70s, and sold them at a profit and got the clients into something else during '80s. The condos they originally bought only cost around $30-40K. You sure about that Tradelite? We had condo conversions here that sold for around that range 40K in what I thought was the late 70s but could have been early 80s. The owners couldn't rent the units for anywhere close to the mortgage and fees (especially since these were conversions and therefore there were tons of rentals that were similar available)- so they paid for the priviledge of owning these things for just about 10 years, finally being able to sell them for maybe 40-50K in the 80s. Lots of the associations were sued and in many cases people just walked away from the units, because to sell it meant the agent fees. BTW the association fees on many of these were almost equal to what you could rent the unit for, I was told. In general I would say almost every condo buyer in the late 70s early 80s regretted the purchase around here (N CA). Now, if you bought a special kind of unit, like in SF with a view, or a townhome that was different. But those condos on the peninsula were a loser, and there were millions of them. I think the same thing is going to happen with this period. If people bought a HOUSE, or a desirable townhome then they can wait through a decline and probably come out ok- but buying one of these edge case properties thinking the market will "come back" is really naive. There was one piece of land which was obviously zoned residential right next to the freeway I am thinking of... this land had been available for development for YEARS- finally in around 03 some developer bought it and put up condos/townhomes. Those are worthless in a downturn imho.