The legally blind billionaire, Steve Wynn has put his 3,500 square foot apartment on the market for a paltry sum of $25,000,000. With 2 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, master bedroom, formal dining room and library, with a re-design that created two luxurious his and her bathrooms.
Located on the seventh floor on Fifth Avenue, they bought it in 2001 for about $7,000,000. They must think that real estate values have increased more than three fold since they bought it. It’s too bad that the Las Vegas based casino king Steve Wynn may soon be divorcing his wife Elaine and has found someone else.
Previous reports reveal that in July of 2005 the Wynn’s sold their 12,162 square foot mansion located on 4.6 acres in the Shadow Creek Golf Course for around $15,500,000 and then bought a private villa at the Wynn Las Vegas. However, there are six private villas at the Wynn Las Vegas not available to the public and recent reports indicate one is undergoing a renovation. Thought on that is that Steve Wynn is having it being remodeled for his new home.
Selling a home fast in today’s market is somewhat of a challenge. Here are six ways to expedite a sale.
1. Cut the asking price to 10 percent to 15 percent below what comparable properties in the neighborhood are selling for. Pricing your home at current market price in a declining market is almost a guarantee that your home will not sell.
2. Spruce up the outside. First impressions, like a first date, make or break a sale. Update the landscaping. Power-wash the exterior and paint the door.
3. Spruce up the inside. Store all your nick-knacks. Get rid any clutter, make the inside a model home. Stage the home so people coming to view your home can make their own impression of the home, not your motifs. Examples, updated light fixtures and carpet, current paint colors, slipcovers for dated furniture.
4. Appeal to first-time buyers. Advertise on younger consumers’ favorite Web sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Hire a photographer to shoot the house with a wide-angle lens so the rooms look bigger in online photos. We offer this service to all of our clients free of charge, including taking a video of your home to go onto YouTube and post your home on 32 websites.
5. Price the house in the lower end of the range. A $299,000 house is in the high end of the $250,000 to $300,000 range but a $301,000 home is in the low-end of the $300,000 to $400,000 range.
6. Do what you can to make the deal close quickly. Be ready to move, offer to pay part of the closing costs, and/or throw in a year’s worth of association fees.
What has been your experience in selling a home quickly? Let me know.
The Canadian’s have increased their investment in the United States from 11 percent in 2007 to 23.5 percent in 2008, making Canada the largest foreign real estate investor in the U.S. according to the National Association of Realtors®
The strong attraction for the Canadians is that the Canadian “loonie” is at par with the U.S. dollar for the first time since 1976, making this the best exchange rate in more than thirty years. So with property values having fallen so plummeted in the U.S. it is a perfect time to buy.
“The double whammy of falling U.S. real estate prices and a rising Canadian loonie has created a once-in-a-lifetime bargain for Canadians looking for property in the U.S. Sunbelt,” said Bank of Montreal Chief Economist Sherry Cooper. “I love the Canadian dollar at parity. We are truly richer, as the money we earn and the money we invest is worth more.”
“When (the Canadian dollar) hit a dollar ten, it really created a real buzz for Canadians, not only those looking to buy second homes, but we’re also seeing it from buying purely from an investment standpoint,” he said.
The National Association of Realtors reports that 64.4 percent of Canadian buyers plan to use their U.S. homes for vacation purposes.
On average, foreign purchasers plan to stay in their U.S. property 2.6 months of the year. A third intends to use their U.S. home a total of three to six months.
LaVoie, sums it up, “Foreign investment has an undeniable presence in the U.S. real estate market, especially here in Arizona. Opportunities are abundant. Now is the time to buy and our Canadian friends clearly recognize this. For them, this is the most opportune time to invest.”
I think if you have the money, it’s a buying opportunity of a lifetime. Do you think it’s a good time to buy real estate?
Paul Salamone
Home may be a man’s castle, but in Paul Salamone’s case, the entire fiefdom was allegedly fraudulent.
The Medford man is facing a Suffolk County, Long Island, jury this week after being accused of breaking into seven homes in various states of foreclosure and illegally renting some of them out in a scheme to capitalize on the failing local housing market. In his defense, his attorney points out that 28-year-old Salamone, who prosecutors say had renovated some of the vacant houses before he advertised them as for rent on Craigslist, truly believes what he was doing was right. Despite Salamone’s supposed good intentions, at least two families that rented from him were caught in the crossfire and evicted after the alleged scam began to unravel.
Accused felon Paul Salamone is charged with renting foreclosed homes he didn’t own.
“Confusion and misunderstanding, not guns or knives, were Mr. Salamone’s weapons,” said Marc Lindemann, the assistant district attorney who is prosecuting the case, in his opening statements at Suffolk County court in Riverhead on June 22.
Salamone allegedly told realtors that they no longer had ownership of the houses and backed his argument with what Lindemann described as official-looking documents. But many of the houses were actually owned by Deutsche Bank, said Lindemann, a prosecutor with the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office’s Economic Crimes Bureau.
It took police several months to connect the dots. A grand jury had indicted Salamone on five counts of burglary, but two more counts were added when additional houses were discovered. He was also charged with grand larceny for the “rent” he received, and criminal possession of a forged instrument for filing more than a dozen fraudulent liens.
Salamone’s attorney, Eric Naiburg, admits that his client made a serious mistake, but insists he is not a crook.
“He had no right to be in these houses,” the Smithtown-based attorney said in his opening statement. “That is conceded. That he went into these houses with the intent to commit a crime, that is not conceded, not conceded at all.”
“If this was a scheme, it was dumb,” Naiburg said, adding that if Salamone was trying to scam people, as prosecutors allege, then “he is the worst scam artist this nation has ever seen.”
What do you think of the defense attorneys statement? Salamone rented the homes out that wasn’t his, but Salamone did not intend to commit a crime? Huh?
Two of the kidnapping suspects
So we have financial advisors who steal money in this country and wait for the wheels of justice to turn to punish them. But some senior citizens in Germany had what they thought was a better approach to punish and get their money back at the same time.
The good senior citizens ambushed James Amburn, 56 outside his home in Speyer, Western Germany, bound him with duct tape and bundled him into a car trunk.
Amburn was than driven 300 miles to the Bavarian lakeside home of one of the gang. As the financial advisor Amburn, who runs investment firm Digitalglobalnet, was taken to the cellar another couple, retired doctors, joined the kidnappers in the cellar where Mr. Amburn was chained and tortured for four days last week.
The reason for all of the anger from the good citizens was that the financial advisor has lost the equivalent of $3.3 million of their money. It seems that their money was supposed to have been invested in Florida real estate, which of course was lost completely.
Mr Amburn said: ‘I had known these people for 25 years. I had no reason to be afraid. But as I went into my home I was jumped from the rear and struck.
‘They bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath. When they loaded me into the car I thought I was a dead man.
‘I was bleeding from my eyes, nose and my mouth. But the nightmare had only just started.’
During his confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr Amburn claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two of his ribs broken when he was hit with a chair leg and chained up ‘like an animal.’
He says he was fed only two bowls of watery soup during his four days in the dungeon.
He was rescued when he convinced his captors that he had money in a Switzerland bank that could be transferred to them if they allowed him to fax a note to the bank. They agreed to let him send the fax, but unknown to the seniors he scribbled a note at the bottom of the fax to call the police.
Shortly afterwards, the Swiss bank telephoned police in Germany and an armed team of special SEK commandos was scrambled and the house was stormed in the early hours of Saturday morning.
An ambulance with a doctor had to be called not only for Mr. Amburn, but also for the senior citizens because of their infirmities. How about that!
Chief public prosecutor Volker Ziegler said: ‘They were angry because they invested money in properties in Florida and he lost it all.
‘This was black money – they hadn’t declared it to the revenue authorities in Germany.’
Mr. Amburn is recovering from cigarette burns, broken ribs, threats of being killed by the Mafia. The seniors are facing 15 years in jail for kidnapping, torture and tax evasion.
Finally what do you think of this vigilantism? Do you condone their actions?
I have said many times on this site, now is the time to buy real estate if you have the money and can wait for the market to change. Now REITs (real estate investment trusts) with stronger balance sheets are building billion-dollar war chests to fund acquisitions of troubled properties on the cheap. They’re raising the money to fund acquisitions of distressed commercial properties.
REITs are more then ready, having raised over $12 billion by issuing stock in recent months. There’s an estimated $90 billion in the U.S. that is “distressed” according to New York based real estate research firm Real Capital Analytics.
These are properties that have been foreclosed on, or whose owners are in default on their loans or in bankruptcy. “On top of those properties, there is hundreds of billions more in debt coming due in the next few years,” says Peter Slatin, editorial director at Real Capital. “Some REITs are getting prepared for that.”
The four blue-chip REITs cited above represent a fairly conservative way for individual investors to profit from the (hoped-for) real estate rebound. The fact that they have the resources to exploit today’s weak market may set them up for years of healthy cash flows. “These are the commercial real estate companies that are going to survive,” says Jim Sullivan, senior REIT analyst with Green Street Advisors. “They all have balance sheets that are stronger than average and management teams that have proven their ability to take advantage of downturns.”
Anyone who goes bargain hunting in real estate today has to be patient. REITs fell earlier and harder than the broader real estate market. In the two years from March 2007 to March 2009, REIT stocks fell a stunning 75% on average. Lately, however, REITs have been on a roll, with the MSCI U.S. REIT index gaining more than 45% since the March low. Does this spurt mean that REITs are foreshadowing a sharp rise in real estate values? Some experts caution that there is more pain to come. “Prices have gotten ahead of the fundamentals in real estate,” says Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. “It has gone too far, too fast.” Rosen expects a correction in the coming months.
But many analysts like the longer-term outlook. “The underpinnings of the commercial real estate market are really in pretty good shape,” says Philip Martin, a senior vice president of Golub & Co., a Chicago-based real estate investment and development firm. He notes that there isn’t the kind of massive oversupply of commercial properties that existed during the slump of the late 1980s and early 1990s. “So when we do recover, you are likely to see a pretty healthy snap-back in real estate prices,” he says. “This is an excellent environment for those REITs with the right combination of knowledge and capital. They are going to have an opportunity to make some great deals, and the risk-adjusted returns at this point in the real estate cycle are going to be pretty darn good.”
Lawmakers and businesses are calling for an expansion of the existing tax credit now capped at $8,000 to be raised to $15,000. The existing federal tax credit of $8,000 has been a success in spurring first-time home buyers to get back into the housing market.
A further proposed change would be that the tax credit would be applied to anyone who buys a home.
First-time buyers make up a hefty 40% of home purchases, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which is about 5 percentage points higher than the historical average.
Some economists say a tax benefit is vital to spur home buying and help stabilize prices.
According to USA Today the current proposals are:
“•A Senate bill to expand the tax credit to $15,000 for any home buyer regardless of income was introduced this month by Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga. It is co-sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn.
“It would go a long way toward inducing trade-up buyers into the market,” says Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the NAR.
•A House bill to keep the $8,000 credit in place until June 2010 and expand it to all home buyers was introduced last month by Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Texas. It also would provide a $3,000 credit to homeowners who refinance.
•Another bill in the House, introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, would extend the credit to all home buyers through 2010.”
The present tax credit does not apply to singles earning more than $95,000 a year and couples who earn more than $170,000.
Buyers do not have to repay the tax credit if they occupy the home for three years or more.
Babette Kosar's Former Home
Former gridiron great Bernie Kosar, dogged by financial and legal problems, filed for bankruptcy Friday. In the meantime his former wife Babette sold their home for a cool $2,400,000 according to Zillow.com. Kosar’s wife, Babette, divorced him in 2007. Last year, his Bernie Kosar’s Steakhouse went out of business.
Kosar, 45, the former Miami Hurricane and NFL quarterback, filed for Chapter 11, which is generally used by companies to reorganize.
The bankruptcy petition didn’t provide much detail. Boxes were checked off on the petition indicating Kosar has assets estimated between $1 million and $10 million and liabilities of between $10 million and $50 million.
The filing listed Kosar’s largest unsecured creditors, owed a combined $19.5 million. Among them and the amount of their claims: the Cleveland Browns, a team he quarterbacked from 1985 to 1993, nearly $1.5 million; his ex-wife Babette, $3 million; and Jim Ferraro, the owner of the Cleveland Gladiators, an Arena Football League team, $725,000. Kosar is the team’s president.
Other major unsecured creditors include Tampa’s Florida Bank, owed about $9.7 million over some sour real estate investments and Key Bank of Cleveland is owed about $3.1 million.
The filing marks a hard fall for Kosar, the star Hurricanes quarterback in the 1980s who went on to excel in the NFL with the Cleveland Browns before ending his career with the Miami Dolphins in 1996.
Lenders also obtained foreclosure judgments on apartment properties Kosar had an interest in in Tampa, Clearwater and Pinellas Park.
A recent story by Yahoo points out that Kosar needs to mount a comeback. Read Yahoo’s Story about Kosar.
Foreign real estate investors expect the U.S. real estate market to recover by the end of the second quarter of 2010, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE).
Survey respondents were optimistic about the prospects for good returns, with more than two-thirds planning to invest in U.S. real estate before the end of the year.
About 31 percent said they were more hopeful now about the health of the U.S. real estate market than they were in January, 16 percent said they were more pessimistic, and 53 percent said their opinion had stayed the same.
The 200 members surveyed predicted that Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco would be the first cities to recover, followed by Boston and Los Angeles.
Source: Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (06/17/2009
Investors have filed a lawsuit against Stewart Title Company and Heritage Oaks Bank (HOB) alleging they aided and abetted or conspired with Hurst Financial Inc. (HFI) in defrauding hundreds of seniors through illegal investment schemes.
“The suit filed by more than 300 investors against Stewart Title, HOB, and HFI lists eight complaints including conspiracy, fraud, financial elder abuse, and negligence. Investors are seeking punitive as well as compensatory damages.
Late last month, the FBI seized assets of (HFI) President Jay Miller’s home because of allegations of racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud, according to a seizure warrant. The suit alleges HFI could not have engaged in a “Ponzi scheme” without the “joint effort, cooperation, and planning” of Stewart Title.
San Diego based attorneys Steven Sanchez and David Noonan, of the law firm of Kirby Noonan Lance and Hodge, claim that Stewart Title, working alongside HFI, siphoned money from investor loans to place in the pockets of HFI principles Miller and his daughter Courtney Brard. Sanchez cites examples of the title company creating false escrows, falsely closing active escrows, and illegally filing clean title reports before placing additional loans on already encumbered properties.
In addition, Stewart Title failed to notify investors when they discovered the fraudulent dealings following an internal audit and interviews that were spurred by numerous lawsuits and allegations of illegal activity “
According to the article, more than 1,000 people invested in this scheme, most of them seniors, resulting in over $100 million unaccounted for.
It’s amazing how investors get involved in schemes which promise a high return. The higher the interest rate that you are promised, the more risk that you are taking. When times are good and everyone seems to be getting rich, people want to get into the action.
The lesson here is as before, check very carefully before you invest your money. Remember, If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
