[lbo-talk] bubble

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Jan 19 13:00:02 PST 2005


A friend of mine whose day job is raising capital for real estate developers (i.e., not an amateur baying from the sidelines) writes:


>I thought you would be interested in this.
>
>In particular, I thought you'd find the following item interesting:
><http://www.tompaine.com/articles/trouble_at_home_the_housing_bubble.php>
>
>DH:An acquaintance of mine is going through a divorce.He went to the
>local high end stereo store to restock his gadgets for an apartment
>he's renting.The store manager sympathetically encourages my pal to
>rent the condo he(the manager) just acquired with a 95% floating
>rate loan,which now sits empty.What the fuck is some retail store
>manager doing speculating in Real Estate?The frenzy has had the
>effect of driving up everybody's real estate taxes,thus putting
>these speculator's deals deeper in the hole,not to mention his/her's
>primary residence.UH OH! mIAMI/dADE COUNTY HAS 58,000 condo's
>approved or under construction,the historic best year sales has been
>8,500 units.The developers have driven up construction costs to the
>point that committed pre construction unit sales no longer cover
>costs.A train wreck waiting to happen.



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