Archive for July 18th, 2008
Continue Reading July 18th, 2008
So I’ve decided to take a stab at real estate investing. I found a duplex for sale in Los Angeles. The property is a short sale. The owner bought it in November 2005 for $417,000. He put no money down and promptly took out what looks like another $60,000 in a home equity loan, most likely to remodel it. How he got a home equity loan on a property he had no equity in is beyond me. All the loans were supplied by Countrywide.
When I saw it, the property was listed at $385,000. It’s cute, nicely remodeled. The neighborhood also looked nice and it’s blocks from a pretty college campus. The part of town as a whole is largely blue collar and nearby there are issues with gangs, but more and more artsy types are moving to the area.
I offered $350,000 plus all closing costs, an amount my Realtor and the listing agents suggested was too low. Days later I saw the price knocked down to my $350,000 offer on a real estate Web site. I called the listing agent furious that he was trying to smoke out other offers by advertising my low bid to the world. The agent told me he had reduced the price to $350,000 in the MLS but that turned out not to be true. I grew concerned that other things he had told me might not be true. What if the apartments weren’t really renting for what he said? I withdrew my offer.
Did I do the right thing?
Read more »
Continue Reading July 18th, 2008
Some of you may remember Tim Mullaney, who worked for BW for a number of years and wrote some nice guest blogs for Hot Property. Tim has since moved on to bigger and better things–or different things, anyhow–and now has his own blog called It’s Only Temporary. The blog name, he says, comes from
Anyway, here’s one blog and here’s another that he wrote upon discovering that the house he grew up in is being sold as a foreclosed property. He had a crazy idea about buying it himself but I think he’s gotten over that.
Read more »
Continue Reading July 18th, 2008
C.W. Clark Inc. recently got the green light from the San Diego City Council to move forward with its redevelopment of the Bay View Plaza, a San Diego shopping center originally constructed in the 1950s. Read more »
Continue Reading July 18th, 2008
Ownership of Edison Commons, a 150,000-square-foot shopping center in Edison, N.J., has changed hands with AMC Delancey Group Inc.’s sale of the property to a subsidiary of MCC Realty Investments L.L.C. Read more »
Continue Reading July 18th, 2008
The distribution buildings at 26 and 28 Millbury Street in Auburn, Mass., about 40 miles west of Boston, traded for an aggregate $38.5 million. Read more »
Continue Reading July 18th, 2008
A partnership including Kent Swig of Swig Equities L.L.C. has sold a pair of pre-war apartment buildings on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to a locally–based operator of residential and mixed-use properties for $61 million, or about $450 a square foot. Read more »
Continue Reading July 18th, 2008
The Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority has completed its new 300,000-square-foot gaming and entertainment complex at Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs in Wiles-Barre, Pa. Read more »