By Paul Takahashi

August 25, 2015

A neighborhood association has raised concerns about a proposed new luxury condominium midrise in Houston’s Museum District.

The Museum Park Neighborhood Association, which represents about 3,500 homes in the Museum District, took issue with Oxberry Group, a Houston-based developer that is planning to build The Mondrian at the Museums. The eight-story, 20-unit condo project will replace The John C. Freeman Weather Museum at 5104 Caroline St., near the Asia Society Texas Center.

“It’s heartbreaking and something of a shame we’re losing another wonderful building in Houston,” said Sean Murphy, president of the neighborhood association. “We don’t have many of them left. We keep tearing them down.”

Ward Lucas August 25, 2015

St. Petersburg’s Signature Place condo is in the news again. Condo owners have known for months that there were construction defects with leaky windows. Well, now that portions of stucco have been removed and walls have been opened up to assess the extent of the problem, it turns out that someone forgot to put re-bar in the concrete walls. Oh, and, by the way, the stucco job has allegedly been botched, too. The Condo Board is concerned that residents or pedestrians walking by the tower could be injured by falling stucco. Not a concern to be taken lightly with Florida’s offshore winds and threats of hurricanes.

The owners are looking at major construction noise and disruption through December 2016. Although there is pending litigation between the Association and the Developer Joe Cantor and several construction companies, these are apparently emergency repairs that cannot wait for a painstakingly slow legal process. So condo owners are facing hefty special assessments, spread out over 10 years of monthly assessment increases.

According to the Tampa Bay Times report, those assessments range from about $10,000 to $132,000, depending on the size of the condo unit, with many around $50,000. Sale prices of units have ranged from units auctioned off in the $200-300 thousand range to $1.3 million for the grand penthouse. Owners of the more modestly priced units will be hit hardest, because they are living on relatively modest fixed incomes.  Read more:

By Mary Shanklin

August 6, 2015

New owners of the West Orange Country Club have a message for nearby residents: Become a member, or the golf course and its long-standing club will become just another housing development.Longtime country-club member Jim Karr, a land broker, led three other investors last month in buying the financially struggling club for about $1.3 million. Buyers paid off the club’s debts and are repainting, re-roofing and tearing out about 30 dead pine trees from the 155 acres.

By Nicholas Nehamas

Published August 22, 2015

Article Courtesy of The Miami Herald

In Miami’s surging real estate market, even the price of parking has hit overdrive.

Residents of a downtown luxury condo have been told they must cough up $1.5 million for the 50 parking spots they’ve used for valet parking — for free — since the building opened in 2008.

That’s $30,000 per spot, or $196 per square foot of parking, assuming the spaces are the minimum size mandated by city code. The average home in Miami-Dade County sells for $175 per square foot, according to real estate website Trulia.

Unit owners at the building, a 40-story tower on Biscayne Boulevard at Third Street called Met One, aren’t happy about telling Mom and Dad to park somewhere else if they want to come visit.

“Needless to say the board and unit owners expected that upon purchasing their units they would forever and always have the ability to have valet parking,” said Eric Glazer, an attorney for the condo association.

Developer MDM Group has already turned the building, which has 447 units, over to the association. But MDM still owns 50 guest parking spaces in the building’s garage. If buying the spots strikes residents as a bad deal, MDM principals Ricardo Glas and Luis Pulenta have also offered to rent them out for a total of $10,000 per month.

But neither option appeals to the condo association.  Read more:

By U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

July 28, 2015

DENVER – Vail Run Community Resort Association, Inc., a condominium complex in Vail, Colo., and its management company, Global Hospitality Resorts, Inc., violated federal law by allowing a housekeeping manager to sexually harass Mexican female employees, including attempted rape, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit filed today.EEOC further alleged the defendants retaliated against men and women who complained about the harassment to management, including Global Hospitality’s controller, Alan McLean, or owner, William Fleischer.

According to EEOC’s suit, Omar Quezada, the housekeeping manager, repeatedly spoke about sex, propositioned female employees, showed them graphic pictures on his phone, and groped and physically assaulted his victims, including attempted rape. Quezada targeted Mexican immigrants who were particularly vulnerable, threatening them with job loss and deportation if they refused his advances, complained about him, or went to the police.

When workers nevertheless complained to management, they were met with anger and indifference. EEOC said the companies never undertook an internal investigation after the complaints, made no effort to reduce Quezada’s supervisorial powers, and did not discipline Quezada. Two victims were finally forced to go to the police for help, and both of these women were later fired. In 2013, an Eagle County jury found Quezada was guilty of unlawful sexual contact and felony extortion, and Quezada pled guilty to additional similar charges after the jury verdict.  Read more:

By Terri Parker

August 18, 2015

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —The Palm Beach Gardens investor who in March threatened to dissolve a Century Village condominium association and force residents out, has changed his mind. According to a July letter written by Donald Kelly’s attorney to several other residents in the building, “It is not my client’s intention to terminate the condominium association known as Sheffield O Condominium.”

“So I’m glad, I’m glad it’s not going to happen,” said David Israel, president of the United Civic Organization, which acts as property manager for Century Village. Israel said people were in a panic when Kelly sent 71-year-old Nancy Salmi a letter in March, saying, “I am in the process of taking steps to dissolve the association of Sheffield O, whereby all of the apartments that I do not own would be forced to sell to me at the Palm Beach County appraiser’s value.”

“I mean, that’s really a threat,” Salmi said in July. Salmi and others in the longtime retirement community said they were scared because, according to Florida law, if an investor like Kelly owns 80 percent of the units, he can legally force the other homeowners to sell. The law was originally intended to let investors take over hurricane-damaged buildings and rebuild, but has been used in recent years to snap up lower-priced properties – which often belong to the elderly – and resell or rent at a profit. Read more:

By Bob Norman

August 7, 2015

NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – When you walk into Peter and Debbie Orlowsky’s home, it seems a perfectly fine condo, until you look outside and see the balcony to nowhere. It’s just a slab of concrete jutting from the building with no railing six stories above the parking lot.

It’s one of dozens of condos at Jade Winds in North Miami Beach that have unusable sealed-off balconies for years, and it’s just the beginning. The place seems to be going to seed, with large cracks in some buildings, a general state of disrepair, and the historic office tower that has been the pride and joy of the community empty and condemned from neglect and failure to pay rent. Recently, the condo association filed for bankruptcy in federal court claiming more than $1.5 million in debt.

“They ran it down to the ground,” said Debbie Orlowsky. “It’s all full of mold because they didn’t pay the rent there. We’re bankrupt. I don’t know what we’re going to do. There’s people here with children, and there’s families. There’s 916 apartments here and they didn’t care. They had no heart, no soul.”

Orlowsky is referring to former board president and former Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputy Santiago Perez, his wife Revital Sharony and former condo manager Donna Mantin, whom current board members claim drove the condo into bankruptcy. Criminal complaints have been filed against them alleging that hundreds of thousands of dollars in controversial all-cash parking fees levied on guests that were collected under their leadership have vanished.

“There wasn’t deposits made into the bank,” said Peter Orlowsky, a member of the board who filed a criminal complaint in the case.

Records also show that at the end of Perez’s time as president last fall, he began writing large checks on the Jade Winds account to cash, adding up to more than $800,000. Perez claimed to pay major condo bills with the money, but now the board is facing the difficult task of trying to account for all the money. In a statement to Local 10 News, BB&T Vice President David White confirmed the bank was conducting an internal investigation into what he called a “very unfortunate situation for all those involved.”

When Santiago and Mantin left their positions last fall, board members were able to obtain emails and credit card statements of Sharony, Perez’s wife, who is a former Margate police officer. What they found shocked them. The credit card bills, according to criminal complaints, showed that more than $170,000 had been deposited into Sharony’s account in an 11-month period, indicating a lavish lifestyle some board members believed couldn’t be sustained by two retired police officers. Nearly $20,000 in cash was deposited in the account in one 12-day period, the billings show.  Read more:

guest blog by Sara Benson

August 17, 2015

So far, we have several hundred responses yet we still need your help!

We need one final push. Please take the survey and promote the survey on all of your social media networks.

Here is the link to the survey: http://bit.ly/1K11ovs

You can remain anonymous if your wish. Read more:

August 17, 2015

“Please be aware that this type of flag is not permitted in the community,” the letter reads. It goes on to say, “We have received several complaints regarding the offensive nature of your flag, as well as concerns it may hinder the sale of homes in the community.”  Read more:

http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/29801879/nc-man-fights-hoa-order-to-remove-confederate-style-flag

By Jeff German

August 16, 2015

Inspired by his lucrative takeover of the Vistana homeowners association, then-construction company boss Leon Benzer moved swiftly a decade ago to broaden the scheme across the Las Vegas Valley, according to once-secret government trial papers.

Benzer enlisted the help of high-profile attorney Nancy Quon, who invested $3 million in the push to corrupt other HOAs — all with the goal of obtaining additional construction defect litigation for her firm and contracts for Benzer’s company to do construction repairs.

Quon agreed to share 10 percent of her attorney’s fees with Benzer as she sought to file lawsuits and obtain settlements for the HOAs, according to the trial papers.

The 17-page brief written by Justice Department lawyers describes the key players in the massive scheme and provides a road map to how the conspiracy widened and caught the attention of the FBI and Las Vegas police.

A total of 42 defendants either pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial in what is thought to be the largest public corruption case ever in Southern Nevada.

Earlier this month, Benzer, who pleaded guilty in the scheme, was sentenced to 15½ years in federal prison. Quon was never charged but while under investigation killed herself in March 2012.

Worried that a Review-Journal story might cause prejudicial publicity before the February trial of four defendants, Justice Department lawyers did not publicly file the brief as they normally would. Instead, they gave copies directly to defense lawyers, who were bound by a judicial order not to disclose any evidence as they prepared for trial.

Last week, prosecutors gave the brief to the Review-Journal in the “spirit” of a federal judge’s order sought by the newspaper unsealing some three dozen documents filed in the long-running case. U.S. Magistrate Judge George Foley Jr. has yet to rule on another Review-Journal request to make public 6 million pages of evidence, including 10,000 pages of investigative reports, that prosecutors turned over to defense lawyers.

Read more: