Herald Tribune Business Weekly Press Release

Herald Tribune Business Weekly Press Release

NAI Manasota - Sean Dreznin

NAI Manasota, based in Lakewood Ranch, has added hired two commercial real estate specialists, Sean Dreznin and Richard Sellers….

Dreznin is a commercial property management professional who owned and operated a professional services management company for several years. He will work with NAI’s Commercial Investment Sales & Special Asset Services group.

Click here for full article <——

The Announcement of a New Career in a Familiar Industry.

The Announcement of a New Career in a Familiar Industry.

Commercial Investment Sales, Asset Services and Property Management

It is my pleasure to announce I have accepted the position of Commercial Investment Sales, Asset Services and Property Management Advisor with NAI Manasota.

Here is the link to my profile.

Siesta Key Beach Live Webcam

Another Boring Sunset on Siesta Key Beach -- The #1 beach in the US

 

http://www.seesarasotalive.com/siesta-key

 

Siesta Key Beach Live Webcam

5 Things Your Landlord Won’t Tell You

5 Things Your Landlord Won’t Tell You

By Kelli B. Grant , SmartMoney.com

Dec 8, 2010 Provided by: Shareretweet

1). “This building is in foreclosure.”
In late 2009, Melody Thompson called her landlords to ask about the well-dressed picture-takers outside her four-bedroom Portland rental home. “Oh, we’re refinancing,” she remembers them telling her. Then in late April, a formal bank notification arrived in the mail, stating that the home was in foreclosure and would be put up for sale in late August. “I was immediately angry,” says Thompson, the executive director of Financial Beginnings, a financial literacy nonprofit. “They lied.” The sale has been postponed twice as the landlords apply for a mortgage adjustment, but Thompson is still hunting for a new place.

Renters accounted for 40% of families facing eviction from foreclosure in 2009, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. And unfortunately, they often hear about it as Thompson did — from the bank, just weeks before the sale, says Janet Portman, an attorney and the managing editor of legal book publisher Nolo. “The landlord wants the tenant in there, paying rent,” she says. The lack of notice was so pervasive that last year Congress passed the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act, which gives tenants at least 90 days from the foreclosure sale to move out. (Previously, they had as few as 30 days, Portman says.) Provided the new owner doesn’t want to live there, the law also lets legitimate tenants — those who signed a lease before the sale and pay a market value rent, among other qualifications — stay through the end of their lease.

2) “You should complain more.”
When a steady drip, drip, drip of water from the ceiling led a third-floor tenant to complain, Adam Jernow, a principal at property management firm OGI Management in New York City, assumed they were dealing with a leaky pipe. It wasn’t until a week later, when the tenants on the top floor two flights above that apartment finally called, that he realized they were dealing with a big roof leak from heavy summer rains. Had upper-floor tenants complained sooner, Jernow says, they could have limited the damage, and that third-floor tenant might not have had a problem at all. So while renters often assume quirks like hot-then-not showers or moisture on the walls is just part of big-city living – or that complaining to the landlord will just open up a can of worms – keeping a property owner informed can actually help a problem get fixed faster. Besides, most states require landlords to keep the property in good repair, with home systems and appliances in working order.

3) “There’s more to negotiate than the rent.”
Rental markets in many cities around the country have improved this year, which means landlords have less incentive to cut you a break. Just 31% of landlords lowered rent in 2010, versus 69% in 2009, according to property marketplace Rent.com. All the major real estate investment groups are asking for higher rent on new leases, and about half are doing so on renewals, says Peggy Abkemeier, the president of Rent.com.

But the market hasn’t improved so much that landlords don’t have incentive to keep good tenants, she says. The survey found that 44% of landlords are willing to lower security deposits, and 22% will offer an upgrade to a fancier unit (think better views, quieter neighbors, newer kitchen) without raising rent. And there’s still that 31% of landlords who will offer a price break. “It never hurts to ask,” Abkemeier says. In markets where vacancy rates are still high, such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, Orlando and Phoenix, tenants have a better chance.

For the last 2 items… Click Here to go to original story.

Wicker Inn sells for $4.2 million via The Observer

Date: June 15, 2010
by: Robin Hartill | Community Editor
The Wicker Inn property includes 10 rental suites and one cottage.

The Wicker Inn sold for $4.2 million Friday, June 11, according to Reid Murphy, who represented both the buyer and seller for the transaction. According to Murphy, the resort, which is located at 5581 Gulf of Mexico Drive, was listed on the MLS for just five days before it went under contract. The property was initially listed for $5.5 million.

“Beachfront is becoming harder and harder to come by,” Murphy said. “We negotiated it last weekend, and it closed immediately. It was the perfect scenario.”

The seller was U.S. Assets Group, a Sarasota company registered to Thomas Brown. The resort was purchased by a family who spends the winter in the area, Murphy said. At press time, their names were not available.

The property consists of 10 rental suites and one cottage, which range from one bedroom to three bedrooms. U.S. Assets Group purchased the property for $5.6 million in August 2006 and initially planned to transform the resort into Wicker Beach, a six-unit luxury condominium community with units priced from $3 million to $4 million. But, according to Murphy, the property will continue to operate as a resort.

Siesta Key Beach #2 in the U.S. for 2010 on Dr. Beach’s list

Siesta Key Beach Sunset

“Dr. Stephen Leatherman, director of Florida International University’s Laboratory for Coastal Research. Known by the moniker Dr. Beach, this is Leatherman’s 20th year of compiling a list of the country’s top 10.

This year’s list includes two

beaches in Florida, and Leatherman said he was not worried about pollution from the oil spill affecting those locations. Siesta Beach in Sarasota took the No. 2 spot on the list, and Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne was No. 10.”

Changes coming to Siesta Key Beach

The plans call for more than 300 more parking spaces, most of them unpaved; landscaped parking-lot islands; landscaped circular entryway; new concession building; new restrooms; park-wide walkway; elimination of the public safety building at the beach entrance; nature trails; and paver walkways from the parking lot to the beach.

For the full article, click here —–> http://www.yourobserver.com/news/sarasota/Front-Page/051020106100/Siesta-Key-Beach-changes-coming

Contact Robin Roy at rroy@yourobserver.com.

Sarasota property values drop again

By Doug Sword & Michael Braga
Staff Writers Sarasota Herald TRribune

Property values in Sarasota County declined another $7 billion last year, bringing to $30 billion the amount the Great Recession has drained from the real estate market.

For full article, click here —-> http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100524/ARTICLE/5241046/0/OPINION

More than one in five homeowners underwater: Zillow

Ok, first things first. I am not a fan of Zillow. Zillow is consistently criticized for taking a biased approach for valuations. It is reticent to sticking your toe into the Atlantic Ocean off Daytona Beach, FL to get the temperature in the Atlantic Ocean off New England… Sometimes the market moves to fast to take its correct temperature.

Ok, now with that preface out of the way, the article reads like this.

Home values in the United States extended their fall in the first quarter, with more than one in five homeowners now owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, real estate website Zillow.com said on Wednesday.

U.S. home values posted a year-over-year decline of 14.2 percent to a Zillow Home Value Index of $182,378, resulting in a total 21.8 percent drop since the market peaked in 2006, according to Zillow’s first-quarter Real Estate Market Reports, which encompass 161 metropolitan areas and cover the value changes in all homes, not just homes that have recently sold.

U.S. homes lost $704 billion in value during the first quarter and have depreciated $3.8 trillion in the past 12 months, according to analysis of the reports.

Declining home values left 21.9 percent of all American homeowners with negative equity by the end of the first quarter, Zillow said.

By comparison, 17.6 percent of all homeowners owed more on their mortgage than their property was worth in the fourth quarter of 2008, and 14.3 percent were underwater in the third quarter of last year, the reports showed.

Nine consecutive quarters of declines have left eight regions — including the Modesto, California, Stockton, California, and Fort Myers, Florida regions — with median value declines of more than 50 percent since those markets peaked.

In 85 of the 161 markets covered in the report, the annualized change over the past five years is negative or flat, the reports showed.

For the full article and continued depressing carnage... Click Here <—-

It’s Now a Renter’s Market* *(in some areas)

Across the U.S., desperate landlords are coming up with novel ways to attract new tenants and retain old ones

Amy Gips loves her one-bedroom apartment in a swank Manhattan building that features a gym, golf simulator, yoga studio, and massage rooms. But she no longer feels she can justify paying $4,400 a month in rent, especially now that her ex-boyfriend has moved out.

A week ago, just as the 27-year-old associate at a private equity fund was planning her next move, a letter arrived from the property management company. The rent for the 750-square-foot Chelsea apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Madison Square Park was reduced $900, or about 20%. It changed her calculus, though she hasn’t given up on the idea of shopping around for something under $3,000 a month, with one or two months of free rent thrown in.

For years, rising rents in Manhattan were thought to be as inevitable as baseball at Yankee Stadium. But times change, and in New York, landlords are scrambling to hold on to renters who have been hit by the economic downturn.

That means renters who, like Gips, are still in good financial shape now have the whiphand. “I was thinking that the rent was so high that there was no way I’d consider staying,” says Gips. “Now that they’ve offered the reduction on their own, I kind of feel I should do a bit of negotiation.”

Avoiding Empty Apartments

During the six months since the financial crisis began in earnest, control of the Manhattan rental market has switched to the tenants, who no longer have to pay broker fees (traditionally about 15%) and who can get up to three free months of rent and even gym memberships thrown in just for signing on the dotted line. The power shift might not be as dramatic in other parts of the country, but rents are getting more affordable from Charlotte to San Francisco. And landlords everywhere are getting more creative (and desperate) to hold down vacancies and prevent turnover.

• Landlords figure it’s better to take a hit by offering a month or two of free rent and other freebies than to carry empty apartments that aren’t generating income.

It’s a nationwide phenomenon, according to Victor Calanog, research director at real estate data firm Reis. Half of apartment buildings reduced rents in the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year — the highest percentage since Reis began tracking apartment data in 1980. (By comparison, only 17% of buildings reduced rents in 2007.) And average asking rents fell 0.6%, to $1,046, in the U.S. in the first quarter, compared with the previous quarter, the largest drop since Reis began collecting quarterly data in 1999. And average effective rents, which include free months and other landlord incentives, fell 1.1%, to $984.

Effective rents fell in 64 of 79 markets that Reis tracks. Effective rents in San Francisco dropped 2.8% in the first quarter of this year, compared with the previous quarter — the nation’s largest quarterly decline. Rents fell 2.6% in New York City (all five boroughs), 1.3% in Charlotte, 2.5% in San Jose, 0.9% in San Antonio, 0.9% in Cleveland, 1.2% in Chicago, and 2.3% on Long Island. Only a few markets, such as Houston and Dallas, showed increases, Calanog says.

For Full Article written by Prashant Gopal via Yahoo Finance & Business Week, click HERE <—–