THE COLLECTION and Dwyane Wade Unveil the All-New Audi A7
— On Thursday, April 7th, THE COLLECTION, South Florida's foremost luxury automotive dealership, along with its brand ambassador and all-star Dwyane Wade, and in association with Ocean Drive Magazine, revealed the highly-anticipated, all-new 2012 Audi A7.
Apr. 4 2011 from Forbes.com – Article by Kenneth Rapoza
"Only in Miami...is Brazil so far away."
If south Florida’s real estate market returns from the dead, thank a Brazilian.
Brazil’s upper middle class have been buying properties in Miami and Orlando since the 1990s, when high interest rates and high taxes forced many of them to invest overseas in a way to avoid tax authorities. Now, the middle class is buying up Florida properties, mainly in Miami, thanks to a strong currency, and more spending power than they have had in a generation, a Folha de São Paulo study revealed on Monday.
According to the Association of Foreign Real Estate Investors (AFIRE), Miami’s improving real estate market is due mainly to Brazil’s rising GDP.
“Wealth creation in Brazil is now starting to look for cross-border opportunities, and Miami certainly is a natural,” says Terra Blanca, CEO of Blanca Commercial Real Estate in Real Estate Journal Online last week. Greater Downtown Miami’s condo supply is overstocked, according to AFIRE . South Florida, and Miami especially, could come to depend on attracting foreign buyers like Brazilians while the US job market, and US incomes, continue to hobble along. Real estate prices are rising in Brazil, and still declining in south Florida.
A recent Franklin Templeton survey of foreign investors in some emerging markets showed that 70% of the 1,004 Brazilians surveyed said they would be putting money to work overseas this year. The average within the emerging markets surveyed was 62%.
Miami is ranked a distant 8th for foreign investment in real estate. New York, Washington, DC, Boston and San Francisco were the top four, according to Real Capital Analytics. Thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, the US is currently ranked as the best place for capital appreciation in the world real estate markets, according to Real Capital.
Developers have sold 85 percent of the condos built in South Florida during the building boom beginning in 2002, according to a report released this week by Bal Harbour-based consultancy Condo Vultures.
The report, which studies condo markets from South Beach to West Palm Beach, found that developers have sold 41,258 condos in the last eight years, with the largest chunk of sales taking place in downtown Miami.
``People are certainly taking advantage of the fact that [condos] are affordable and available both to live in and also to invest in,'' said Leo Zabezhinsky, manager of business development and real estate for the Miami Downtown Development Authority.
While many of the boom-time buyers were speculators , many of today's buyers are investors and vultures, hoping to capitalize on the troubled market by renting out the units.
That explains much of the shift in sales activity taking place between South Beach and downtown Miami, as rental demand is up in places like Brickell and purchase prices are lower in the city than by the ocean, said Peter Zalewski, principal at Condo Vultures.
``An investor comes in, they look in South Beach, and they get sticker shock,'' he said. ``If they want to be on the sand, they go up to Sunny Isles Beach. If they're looking for investment value, new construction, they go to downtown Miami.''
Spurred by bulk buyers and lender takeovers, condo sales in downtown Miami reached 3,675 in 2010, up 57 percent from 2009, according to the report, based on county records. Condo sales in South Beach totaled only 123 last year, up from 107 in 2009. At the current sales pace, it would take about a year to sell out the remaining developer inventory in downtown, and more than a decade to sellthe 1,300 new condos in South Beach.
Areas like downtown Fort Lauderdale benefitted from good timing, as developers completed most of their condo projects before their housing market crashed. There are only 160 new condos yet-to-sell in downtown Fort Lauderdale, where more than 5,000 units were built during the boom.
Condo Vultures focused its report on seven housing markets in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, concentrating on areas east of I-95 and near bodies of water. During the 8-year span covered in the report, 244 new condo projects were created in those markets, for a total of nearly 50,000 units.
The epicenter of the building, sales and developer default activity has been in downtown Miami and Brickell, where more condo units were built in the 2000s than in the previous four decades combined.
About 18,675 new condos have sold in the downtown area in the last 8 years, totaling about 84 percent of the inventory, according to the report, based on county records.
Developers ``built 23,000 condos, and when over 80 percent have been sold and occupied, clearly it tells you that this is where people want to live and invest,'' said Zabezhinsky. ``The condos have single handedly helped lead the transformation of downtown Miami into a 24/7 global city.''
South Florida's mortgage market had the nation's highest number of suspicious activity reports in the third quarter of 2010, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network's third-quarter mortgage fraud report released Thursday.
Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties logged 3,039 reports of questionable mortgage loan activity between July and September, about 33 per day, and more than any other metropolitan area in the nation. Florida's 5,404 suspicious activity reports, or SARs, during that time period ranked it second in the nation, behind California. On a per capita basis, Florida ranks ahead of California.
Miami-Dade County had the lion's share of South Florida's fraud reports, with 1,784 in the third quarter, second only to Los Angeles County, which had 1,967.
Jonathan Heller, a Miami defense lawyer defending a client who he believes was a victim of mortgage fraud, said he is not surprised by South Florida's ranking.
``When you have mortgage brokers who are unsavory, who are fueled by irresponsible lenders, it's like the perfect storm,'' he said.
Nationwide, there were 16,693 suspicious activity reports in the third quarter of 2010, up 2 percent from the same period in 2009. Florida was responsible for 32.3 percent of the nation's mortgage loan fraud reports that quarter, the report found.
The top types of mortgage fraud reported were false statements, debt elimination scams, identity theft and money laundering.
Most reports of mortgage loan fraud occur more than two years after the original loan was made. Of Miami-Dade's 1,784 reports logged in the third quarter of last year, only 404 involved loans made after Jan. 1, 2008.
That is consistent with the national trend, as those reporting fraud are focusing more on older incidents.
In the third quarter, 76 percent of SARs occurred before 2008, compared to 54 percent in 2009.
