An article appeared in the Los Angeles times the other day full of some pretty inaccurate statements regarding our downtown real estate market. Since I have been pretty busy with Clients most of the week, I didn’t have time to respond until I clicked on an article posted on Twitter by Kelly Bennett titled A Glut Feeling. I would follow her on twitter @kellyrbennett.
The article written by Peter Y Hong was titled San Diego High Rise Market goes from Frenzy to Fizzzle published on July 27, 2009 starts out with the following:
To see the damage in downtown San Diego, walk a few blocks. Then look straight up.
There you’ll see hundreds of unsold luxury condominiums stacked in vacant high-rises. Some units downtown are now selling for less than half what earlier buyers had paid during the market peak.
These see-through buildings, with names evoking European sophistication like Aria and Vantage Pointe, are the opulent spatter from the bursting of one of California’s flashiest housing bubbles.
Wow, Peter coming from a guy from Los Angeles, this makes America’s Finest City seem almost vacant – a wasteland of empty condominiums. I’m not sure how by walking our streets you can tell which units are vacant, but it sounds pretty dramatic. Perhaps you should visit at night when the lights are on.
Okay, now this is where it really gets good – hang on folks…is this responsible journalism?
From 2001 through 2008, more than 8,000 condominium units were built in downtown San Diego. That’s double the number of downtown units constructed over the same period in Los Angeles, a city three times its size. So while sales of urban high-rise units are convulsing elsewhere, nowhere is the collapse more dramatic than in downtown San Diego.
Well every one knows that you’d want to live in Downtown Los Angeles over America’s finest City. But really Peter, no where is the collapse more dramatic than San Diego?
Seems that our own Kelly Bennett with the Voice of San Diego was able to find a story on the Miami real estate market written by the New York Times – let’s see what they say about Miami Real Estate:
Since 2003, nearly 23,000 new condo units have been added to the downtown skyline, from Brickell Avenue up through the more modest Biscayne Corridor — far more than this city of 400,000 people could absorb. About 9,400 remained unsold at the end of June, according to Peter Zalewski, the owner of Condo Vultures Realty, a local brokerage.
Peter, maybe you want to give Kelly a call and get some tips on investigative journalism before your next story.
In the meantime, if you don’t want a bunch of spin, just some facts, visit my mid 2009 Downtown Market Report.
