American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
I was reading R H’s post A robot could replace your crooked real estate agentand fully understand why he wants a robot to replace RE agents.
You see, I’ve been a licensed real estate agent since the late 1980s. I was active for a few years.
Read my post, Why real estate agents get a bad rap
No, not the shoes, this time it’s the condo:
At $25 Million, a Record Sale in Miami
A MEMBER of the family that controls the German shoe company Birkenstock has sold a triplex penthouse in the South Beach section of Miami Beach for $25 million, a record price for a Miami-area apartment, eclipsing the previous record of $21.5 million reached five months before.
The buyer of the 7,400-square-foot penthouse in the Continuum towers was an Italian who controls an investment company, said Pietro Belmonte, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman who has sold residences in the building. The seller was Alex Birkenstock, who withdrew from day-to-day operations of his family’s shoe company in 2008, according to one person familiar with the matter. He bought the apartment for $9.9 million in 2009.
The sale closed last Friday.
The penthouse, which is on the 40th to 42nd floors, has five bedrooms, seven and a half bathrooms and 6,000 square feet of outdoor space across six terraces, and includes a private pool and an internal elevator. The floor-to-ceiling windows reach as high as 26 feet in the living room, said Khashy Eyn, the chief executive of Platinum Properties of Manhattan and the broker who represented Mr. Birkenstock.
“It is a glass box in the sky,” Mr. Eyn said.
It has rented for $20,000/day, or approximately 200 pairs of Birkenstocks at retail.
It was not listed on the market.
Neither is casa de Fausta, but if you want it for $25 million, make me an offer!
A roundup of trivial news in the periphery of serious issues,
George Soros sued by ex-girlfriend for reneging on real estate promise to buy her a $2 million NYC apartment. George told her he’d given the apartment to another woman. Probably a younger woman, that is. No word on whether he had anything to do with the downgrade.
UPDATE:
Don Surber:
Dr. Evil had the same problem with Frau Farbissina.
Amy Winehouse’s home robbed, not by looters, but by someone looking for her unreleased songs, lyric books and letters.
One Place That Didn’t Get Looted In The UK. Situational Awareness: How Everyday Citizens Can Help Make a Nation Safe. Defend yourself and be a vigilante (h.t Instapundit).
Hugo Chavez’s hair fell off. Argentina Preps for World Tango Championships
Pivot to jobs, jobs, jobs getting to you? Vacay, vacay, vacay! But first, let us pray.
Felonious Monk is not happy at all (*LANGUAGE WARNING: DEFINITELY NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK*)
Here’s Thelonious Monk, not Felonious,
You cross the street from Charles Osgood’s apartment at the Osborne, my favorite Manhattan apartment building,
And you can buy it for $6.9 million.
Billary on the move:
Clintons dealing for $11M Westchester mansion
Looks like Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton are moving on up — to a deluxe mansion away from prying eyes.
Sources told The Post the Clintons are planning to trade their almost-modest suburban Chappaqua home for a sprawling $10.9 million estate in the bucolic Westchester town of Bedford Hills, complete with 20 acres of gorgeous land surrounded by New York’s elite.
The massive compound — sweetly named Clover Hill Farm — comes with high fences, two guesthouses and a mansion fit for Bubba’s millionaire lifestyle.
Reminds me of Dickens’s Hard Times,
Bounderby’s retreat, where, notwithstanding her anchorite turn of mind based upon her becoming consciousness of her altered station, she resigned herself with noble fortitude to lodging, as one may say, in clover, and feeding on the fat of the land.
Fat indeed: Check out the slideshow at the NY Post. I wonder what the carbon footprint is on that spread:
* Sale price of $10.9M
* Built in 2000
* Being sold by Paul Wallace, former president of real-estate firm Broadstone Group
* 20 acres of gardens, horse trails and pastures on private road
* 7,000-square-foot house with five bedrooms, six baths, chef’s kitchen, multiple fireplaces, wood-paneled library, wine cellar
* Heated pool with pool house, stone patios and outdoor fireplace
* Two guesthouses, artist studio and stableWhere would we be without experts? “Experts: Some foreclosed homes too damaged to sell”
Experts: Some foreclosed homes too damaged to sell
A “Washington-based group that supplies data to private mortgage industry analysts” is just finding out now that some foreclosed houses are heavily damaged and may not find a willing buyer. I was selling real estate twenty years ago and could have told them that.
Even back in the olden days you could find houses in such condition that they could not get a certificate of occupancy. The Husband and I even considered purchasing one such house.
There are homeowners out there who don’t give a damn about their homes. Even if their houses are fully paid and won’t be foreclosed, some people don’t mind (and I’ll even say, apparently enjoy) living in a pigsty. I showed houses where the sellers still lived where you wished you had worn a flea collar. These properties were not in blighted areas; they were in very desireable neighborhoods. Some were small and “affordable”, at least one qualified as a mansion.
Other homeowners who are about to be foreclosed will destroy what they can no longer have.
Here’s the situation:
Any given house will sell at the right price.
It may not qualify for a mortgage.
It may have to be bulldozed.
But any given property has a price at which it will sell.The most dramatic example of this was a house one of my customers wanted to buy. The house had burned down to the foundation. My customer, who was a builder willing to pay cash and had no contingencies built into the purchase, was outbid by another buyer.
Why?
The house in question had lake rights.
Obama knows about housing problems
UPDATE
You can listen to the podcast here
My guests are an all-star cast with (in alphabetical order) Ed Morrissey, Rick Moran, Shane Borgess, and Siggy. Asian4Hillary called, and referred us to PumaPac.Org.The Obama campaign kerfuffle – a clear attempt to insert politics of envy in the picture – about McCain hesitating to answer how many houses does he own has backfired.
The truth is that McCain isn’t out of touch with “ordinary people” because he’s rich, he’s out of touch with his own domestic arrangements because he cares little about material things, and for many years has devoted his extraordinary energies not to enjoying his wife’s money, but to serving the American people. Given the number of nights he’s spent in hotels or on military bases over the last few years, it’s no wonder he hasn’t seen much of his wife’s condos.
As Anthony Trollope said, “being the husband of a rich woman is not the same as being a rich man”, especially when you don’t own a house, and the eight houses your family owns are owned by your wife, her dependent children and the trusts and companies they control.
Brian Rogers of the McCain campaign:
“The reality is that Barack Obama purchased his million-dollar mansion in a shady deal involving a convicted felon [Tony Rezko], and it raises questions about his ethics and judgment,” said Rogers.
Rezko is scheduled for sentencing on Oct. 28 — one week before the presidential election. More on Rezko at Rezkorama.
Red State asks, among other questions,
3. How many houses has Bill Ayers plotted to blow up?
Let’s go to the videotape:
Hugh Hewitt quotes Obama, who yesterday was saying that the Beijing infrastructure is “vastly superior” to ours. Hear him say it:
Now, of all the vastly ignorant statements the junior senator from Illinois has come out with, that one takes the cake, at least for now. China’s Communists have used the excuse of the Olympic games to level the medieval city built by the great Ming emperor.
In today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern we’ll be talking about those houses, and the Obama-Ayers connection. Don’t miss it!
The Russians are coming!
Yes, the Russians are in Georgia, but they are also going to the Riviera (the French Riviera, not the old Buick Riviera):
Russian oligarch ‘invader’ pays record £392m for Riviera villa
That’s more or less $800 million to us American peasants (give or take $10-20 million).
Villa Leopolda was built for Belgium’s King Leopold, who exploited what is now Congo as his own estate and used to party hearty at the Riviera and in Paris.
But I digress.
Villa Leopolda sits on 20 acres in Villefrance and is one magnificent place.
Its current owner, Lilly Safra, is the widow of billionaire Edmund Safra, who died in a fire in his Monaco penthouse.
The gardens of the house have been used in films,
Now an unnamed Russian billionaire who likes to party hearty is not the only one throwing his money around:
Russian excess is feeding discontent among poorer people. Pierrette, a housekeeper for one Russian, said: “I attended a party where the guests had fun throwing burning €500 notes into the air while everyone split their sides laughing. The domestic staff were later told to collect the ashes. It was sickening.”
They may yet find out that easy come, easy go.
