The hits keep coming for Miami real estate giant The Related Group. First, the lenders on its extravagant, 420-unit CityPlace South Tower condo in downtown West Palm Beach took control of the project in a “friendly foreclosure.” This is a polite way of saying that Related couldn’t pay its mortgage…
When Ira Goldstein found out his house in Delray Beach was made with defective Chinese drywall, he did the first thing most people would do: He called the home’s builder. And unlike most of those calls, this builder actually offered to help Goldstein.But his builder, Centerline Homes, did nothing short…
Last month, we introduced you to some of the saddest tales from South Florida’s condo meltdown, including the ghostly Tao Sawgrass towers in Sunrise and the now-foreclosed CityPlace South Tower in West Palm Beach. It would be easy to assume that downtown Delray Beach was immune to such problems, since…
Few places illustrate South Florida’s housing bust better than Pembroke Pines. A few years ago, it was one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, with a population that more than ballooned from 65,500 in 1990 to 147,000 in 2007. Now, thanks to a multimillion-dollar drop in permit revenue from new construction,…
Miles Brannan and his wife are feeling the crunch just like everybody else. The Brannans are both South Florida realtors, and when their income dipped with the economy they put their $3 million Fort Lauderdale waterfront house on the market, only to watch it sit there idling. The Brannans had…
For many homeowners suffering with Chinese drywall, it’s safe to say they wouldn’t mind a chance to confront the builders who installed the defective walls in their homes. A woman from Coconut Creek did just that when she hurled tough questions at the CEO of Standard Pacific Homes on a…
Ah, South Florida: Where the women are strong, the men are pretty, and all the foreclosures are “friendly.” Developers of mixed-use, work-live-playgrounds might take a moment to contemplate, as they plan their latest forays into the market for pseudo cities, the fate of the unsellable CityPlace South Tower in West…
Did anyone else get déjà vu reading the front page of the Miami Herald yesterday? Its feature story, “Condo Caverns,” was strikingly similar to New Times’ cover story last week, “Postcards From the Bust,” written by yours truly. My story looked at life inside some of the ghostly high-rise condos…
In this week’s feature story about South Florida’s condo bust, we introduced you to one of the biggest symbols of the real estate boom’s folly: Tao Sawgrass in Sunrise. The twin, 26-story condo towers were built on the edge of the Everglades, next door to the Sawgrass Mills outlet mall…
Reading the Miami Herald headlines Thursday morning, you might have had a Marty McFly moment and thought you woke up in 2015. “Downtown Miami condos filling up fast, report says,” one blared.Huh? Isn’t Miami the center of the nation’s worst condo meltdown? Well, yes. But this particular article made an…
Tad Ground can see the Trump International Hotel & Tower from his office window, its wave-shaped curves gleaming in the sunlight. It taunts him, because three years ago he imagined it would be his home. Ground, an attorney in Fort Lauderdale, was going to give up the hassle of a…
For people like Stephan Cleveland who are trying sublet a condo, the weekend is prime time for prospective tenants to come calling. Which is why he was mighty peeved when on Friday afternoon, he discovered a pile of busted car parts on the grassy swale in front of his condo…
Last week we introduced you to the saga of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Fort Lauderdale. Buyers have filed lawsuits alleging they were misled to believe that Donald Trump was a developer of the building — or, at the very least, that the tower would bear his name…
Everyone knows the condo bust in South Florida is a financial disaster. But now that Donald Trump is involved, it’s a celebrity disaster. A federal class action lawsuit has been filed against the developers of the Trump International Hotel & Tower, alleging that buyers were misled to believe they were…
The Palm Beach County commissioners voted this week to spend $3 million on a new advertising campaign to boost tourism. Meanwhile, in totally unrelated news, The Business Insider, an online publication, named West Palm Beach one of the most depressing places in America. Yes, thanks to the condo bust, this…
[Fade in.] Poolside at the “sugar-pink Boca Raton Hotel” in June 1994. A bunch of young, hard-partying but hungover J.P. Morgan traders there for a conference conceive of something called “credit derivatives.” A potent financial product that when mixed with a housing boom would trigger an atomic meltdown in the…
The Christian Science Monitor is the latest in a long, distinguished line of national media outlets that have come to South Florida to report on our very busted housing bubble. This story reports on day laborers, who are just about nonexistent at the places where contractors, who are out of…
