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Greg,

Can you send me a PM with your number? Thinking about buying a condo in Miami-Dade area.

Thanks

Watch the maintenance costs! What seem to be low price condos can have $700-900 a month maintenance costs due to high foreclosures in the complex causing all the "paying" customers to have higher monthly costs.

My buddy is currently looking and has found several 150-200K units that seem to be a lot of bang for the buck until you add in the maintainance fees! He is paying cash and could still spend 1,000-1200 a month between maintenance,taxes,insurance or rent in the same building for $1500!

Also consider the days on market issue, as in 400+ days on market means it may take you year(s) to sell it!

One other thing to consider is the property taxes if Florida is not your primary residence. I've got a friend who has a place in Pompano that is a nice condo (Probably worth 300-350K). His property taxes are more than 10K a year! He told me that ...if he could sell it, ;) he would just rent a place for three months a year and be waaaay ahead of the game. They also seem to hit him up every 2-3 years for 10K or so for building maintenance money. Complete BS!

FL is usually 2% of value for tax rate (note values used to be a few thousand lower than true market, today they are just about at market value). 500K house, valued by the county at 450K will roughly have a $9,000 annual tax bill. Homesteading only lets the taxable rate rise by a maximum 3% a year so if your neighbor sells for 700K, your assessment can only rise 3% of the 450K (450K @ 3% is 13,500, new tax bill is 463,500 x 2% and your tax bill next year will be $9270) despite your neighbor obviously getting 700K for the same house/neighborhood.

When values/prices were climbing 10-25% a year, no one cared. Now in a flat market a 9K tax bill, plus other costs is making renting look really smart.

The older condos do fall victim to "special assessments" to pay for capital improvements. Newer condos suffer from reserve shortages (not enough money in the reserves to cover emergencies/insurance rate increases etc). Oceanfront or even close has issues with rebar failure due to salt corrosion. Rebuilding balconies gets real pricey. Oceanfront building in Jupiter (roughly a 20-25 year old building) just spent over 4mm on rebuilding rotted balconies. Owners had to move out of the condos, took over a year and special assessments ran into hundreds of thousands per unit. Add in a worker jobsite fatality and it really went down hill! Condos then dipped in value to the point the owners struggled to recover their special assessment fees nevermind make a profit.

thanks for the info. i'm seeing alot of stuff that is CHEAP, so figured there would be some sort of property tax/HOA fee issues.

so don't anyone laugh, but how is it that there are seemingly hundreds of condos for sale at less the 100k??

i see dozens in the North Miami area in 8-10 story buildings for 75k and less??? I'm online right now looking at 2 that are on the river with community boating rights for less than 60k. Am I missing something???

I sent it to you.. let me know if you cant get it

Here is the # for your South Florida real estate connection

Greg just sold a waterfront property to a family member from N.J. & I must say he made the process a pleasure.

954-732-9020

Those price are in the ghetto....There are parts of Miami,North Miami, Miami beach that are in the water but in the ghetto...just get ahold of Greg and you'll be good

thx guys. appreciate the input. will give greg a call.

Shhhh.....that is the typical FL real estate scam don't give away the secrets! :D Railroad tracks, ghetto, under a runway, swampland nah, just show the "good pictures" to the out of towners!