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Mortgage News Daily - Mortgage And Real Estate News

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Mortgage News Daily - Mortgage And Real Estate News

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Mortgage News Daily - Mortgage And Real Estate News

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Mortgage News Daily provides up to the minute mortgage and real estate news including mortgage rates, mortgage rss feeds and blog.

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Why New York Real Estate Is the New Swiss Bank Account -- New York Magazine

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Why New York Real Estate Is the New Swiss Bank Account -- New York Magazine

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The buyer, an Italian, was in town for a week, with a million or so dollars to spend. We met one Sunday morning at 20 Pine, a Financial District condo building. She wore a red scarf, jangly jewelry, and a pair of lime-green sunglasses perched atop her curly hair, and she told me she would prefer to remain anonymous. Working through a shell company, she was looking to anchor some of her wealth in an advantageous port: New York City.

The building's lobby, designed in leathery tones by Armani, swirled with polylingual property talk. As the Italian and I waited for her broker, an Asian man sitting on a couch next to us asked, "You see the apartment?" But he didn't wait for an answer, leaping up to join a handful of women speaking a foreign language heading toward the elevators.

After a few minutes, a fashionably stubbled young man swung through 20 Pine's revolving door: Santo Rosabianca, a broker with Wire International Realty. The firm, run by Rosabianca's brother Luigi, an attorney, specializes in catering to overseas investors. A first-generation American, Santo greeted the buyer with kisses and briefed her in Italian. She was searching for a property that would generate substantial rental income. "Wall Street is not my favorite place," she told me. "But he says it is very good for rent."

Like several other buildings she was being shown, 20 Pine was developed at the height of the real-estate bubble. After the crash of 2008, it became an emblematic disaster, with the developers selling units in bulk at desperation prices, until opportunistic foreigners swooped in with cash offers. The salvage deals are long gone, but 20 Pine retains its international appeal. The one-bedroom the Italian was looking at, on the 27th floor, had a view of the Woolworth Building, sleek finishes, a bachelor-size kitchen, and access to an exclusive terrace reserved for upper-floor residents. It was first purchased by an investment banker in early 2008 for $1.3 million, was resold in 2011 for $850,000, and was now back on the market for close to its prerecession price. Rosabianca told the Italian it would rent for more than $4,000 a month, enough to assure a healthy cash flow while its value appreciated. "There's really no safer way to get that kind of return," he said, "than in New York City real estate."

This is not exactly true—there's plenty of risk in real estate, as the original crop of purchasers at 20 Pine discovered—but that hardly dampens the enthusiasm of foreign buyers, who have become an overpowering force in New York's real-estate market. According to data compiled by the firm PropertyShark, since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in large-scale Manhattan developments have been to purchasers who either listed an overseas address or bought through an entity like a limited-liability corporation, a tactic rarely employed by local homebuyers but favored by foreign investors. Similarly, the firm Corcoran Sunshine, which markets luxury buildings, estimates that 35 percent of its sales since 2013 have been to international buyers, half from Asia, with the remainder roughly evenly split among Latin America, Europe, and the rest of the world. "The global elite," says developer Michael Stern, "is basically looking for a safe-deposit box."

The influx of global wealth is most visible on the ultrahigh end, as Stern and other builders are erecting spiraling condo towers and sales records are regularly shattered by foreign billionaires, like the Russian fertilizer oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, purchaser of the most expensive condo in Manhattan's history ($88 million), and Egyptian construction magnate Nassef Sawiris, who recently set the record for a co-op ($70 million). But much of the foreign money is coming in at lower price points, closer to the median for a Manhattan condo ($1.3 million and rising). In fact, if you've recently been outdone by an outrageous all-cash bid for an apartment, there's a decent chance that, behind a generic corporate name, there's a foreign buyer and an offshore bank account.

"A decade ago, it was just a small number of elite investors," says Andrea Fiocchi, a lawyer at Reinhardt LLP, which caters to an international clientele. But now the market is broad and diversified: Fiocchi's firm handled not only two of the ten most expensive residential sales in the city last year, but also a large volume of transactions at more mainstream prices. Buildings around Times Square and the Financial District are being marketed heavily overseas. One development project on John Street is "crowdfunding" $50,000 financing shares via the Prodigy Network, a marketing firm with offices in New York and Bogota. The Related Companies is using a federal program that promises green cards to foreign investors to raise cheap capital for its Hudson Yards project. (A website features a rendering and the slogan "Your Gateway to the U.S.A.") Shortly before departing on a road show to Monte Carlo and other redoubts of European wealth a couple of months ago, one broker told me about his most adventurous strategy: buying, emptying, and renovating brownstones in Crown Heights. An Australian investment fund has done something similar in Bushwick.

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The buyer, an Italian, was in town for a week, with a million or so dollars to spend. We met one Sunday morning at 20 Pine, a Financial District condo building. She wore a red scarf, jangly jewelry, and a pair of lime-green sunglasses perched atop her curly hair, and she told me she would prefer to remain anonymous.

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Find the latest news, headlines, blogs and watch video about real estate, housing, mortgages, refinancing, apr and real estate markets from CNBC.com.

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Big Hair on Campus: Did Donald Trump Defraud Thousands of Real-Estate Students? | Vanity Fair

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Big Hair on Campus: Did Donald Trump Defraud Thousands of Real-Estate Students? | Vanity Fair

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Donald J. Trump has 2.43 million followers on Twitter, making him the 670th most followed person in the global Twitterverse. Last fall he was sandwiched there between Lonny Rashid Lynn Jr., better known as the Chicago-born hip-hop artist Common, and Alejandro Fernández, or El Potrillo, the Mexican singer.

The Donald likes to tweet about his many triumphs and to re-tweet exhortations for him to run for president and save the country. On October 29, he re-tweeted a boast from his daughter Ivanka-who has more than 1.5 million followers-that the yet to be completed Trump International Golf Club, in Dubai, was voted by the International Property Awards "the Best Golf Development in the Middle East." That same day, he revealed that his Virginia winery had been awarded the "coveted" Virginia Double Gold Medal.

One project The Donald isn't crowing about on Twitter-or anywhere else, for that matter-is the public-relations problem known first as Trump University and then as the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, his effort to teach the great unwashed (for as much as $35,000 a head) his vaunted investing techniques. If Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, is to be believed, this particular (now defunct) Trump enterprise was nothing short of out-and-out fraud. Touré, a host of The Cycle on MSNBC, appears to agree. He tweeted to The Donald, "Why did you rob all those Trump University students out of their money?"

Schneiderman thinks that's a good question, and he wants a good answer. Last August the attorney general's office filed suit against Trump and his associates for more than $40 million in New York State Supreme Court, claiming that between 2005 and 2011 they "intentionally" misled "over 5,000 individuals nationwide," including some 600 New York State residents, who paid to "participate in live seminars and mentorship programs with the promise of learning Trump's real estate investing techniques." Schneiderman asserted that Trump personally made about $5 million from the endeavor-although Trump said he intended to donate any profits to charity. (Now he says that between legal fees and refunds no money is left to do so.)

At a press conference announcing the suit, Schneiderman claimed that "Mr. Trump used his celebrity status and personally appeared in commercials making false promises to convince people to spend tens of thousands of dollars they couldn't afford for lessons they never got."

Trump wasted little time in responding, hitting the airwaves to call into question Schneiderman's character-he's a "political hack," Trump told Fox & Friends -and his motivation for filing the suit. Trump claims that Schneiderman cooked up the lawsuit after visiting with President Obama-the target of much of Trump's political ire (recall Trump's birther non-bombshell)-in upstate New York. They met on a Thursday and Schneiderman filed the lawsuit that Saturday, leaving Trump incredulous. "It's a helluva coincidence," he tells me. "You meet and then you immediately file a lawsuit and the lawsuit is filed not on a Monday or Tuesday but on a Saturday?... I've had a lot of litigation. I have never heard of a lawsuit being filed on a Saturday."

Schneiderman responds, "I assure you I have many more important things to talk to the president about than the fact that we busted this penny-ante fraud... [Trump] seems to be the kind of person who goes to the Super Bowl and thinks the people in the huddle are talking about him." As to why the suit was filed on a Saturday, Schneiderman says that Trump and his attorneys asked him to hold off until the weekend, allowing Trump to leak in advance his side of the story to the Saturday editions of the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal and "to whip up this strange Web site attacking me."

Trump says Schneiderman came to him hat in hand for a campaign contribution in 2010, when he was thinking about running for office. On one of the three visits that Trump alleges Schneiderman made, Trump gave him $12,500: "He said, 'Can you fix me up with some people?' I set him up with people. Now you can make the case 'Isn't that wonderful that there's somebody who helped him that he'll screw.' But you could also say he's a real disgusting human being."

Trump elaborated in a recent letter to Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair: "He wanted to settle and I didn't... During settlement negotiations, he was asking for campaign contributions. He's a sleazebag and a crook who is driving business out of New York City." To Trump's charges, Schneiderman responds, "The fact that he has a larger megaphone than most fraudsters is what gets all the attention here, so I would expect that he would attempt to distract the court, unsuccessfully.... It is true that he did not support me in the Democratic primary when I ran in 2010, and, after I won the primary, he gave me one contribution, which is the only contribution he has ever given me."

Schneiderman fought back with an opinion piece in the Daily News, as well as with numerous TV appearances. "Trump has answered with outlandish accusations," he wrote. "That's not surprising for a showman who has built a career around bluster and hype. But I am not in the entertainment business; I am in the justice business." He conceded that Trump could have settled the case-as another for-profit school did for $10 million-"or answered the charges in a dignified manner through his attorney. Instead," the attorney general continued, "he chose to try the case in the press."

'I went to the Wharton School of Finance," Trump says. "I have a great feeling for education and for knowledge and learning... I love the idea of helping people, because I've had a lot of experience with real estate, to put it mildly."

Trump and his associates Michael Sexton and Jonathan Spitalny formed Trump University as a limited-liability corporation in 2004. The original business plan was to focus on long-distance, Web-based learning, but they would also be "experimenting" with offering "live instructional programs" to paying customers, according to Sexton's subpoenaed deposition.

The following spring, the New York State Department of Education sent letters to both Trump and Sexton notifying them that Trump University was in violation of state law by calling itself a "university" when "it was not chartered as such" and because it had not been properly "licensed" by the state.

In a series of follow-up conversations and e-mails between Sexton and Joseph Frey, then a state education official, Frey explained that Trump University could avoid the "licensure" provision of the state law if it were to re-incorporate outside of New York State and if it ran no physical seminars in the state. But "Trump University failed to abide by any of these conditions," the attorney general wrote.

Schneiderman claims the "university" continued to use 40 Wall Street-one of the few buildings in Manhattan that Trump actually owns-as its principal corporate address, including in numerous advertisements. It furthermore conducted "at least fifty live programs in New York between 2006 and 2011." Schneiderman noted that "Trump University LLC" was finally renamed, on May 20, 2010, "The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC."

In his deposition Sexton admitted that the failure to comply with the stipulations was "an oversight" and something he and Trump "forgot" about.

Also misleading, according to Schneiderman, were the claims made in Trump's advertising. In one, published in 2009, Trump looks resplendent in a blue suit while standing in front of one of the buildings that bear his name-but not his ownership-on Manhattan's West Side. "Learn from Donald Trump's handpicked experts how you can profit from the largest real-estate liquidation in history," the ad promises. (He was presumably not referring to the Chapter 11 filings of the three highly leveraged hotel and casino properties he once had a stake in.) The ad pronounced Trump "the most celebrated entrepreneur on earth. He's earned more in a day than most people do in a lifetime... And now he's ready to share-with Americans like you-the Trump process for investing in today's once-in-a-lifetime real estate market."

This was followed by a quotation from The Donald: "I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you."

Schneiderman argues that Trump University's advertisements, Web site, and promotional materials were just an elaborate ruse. The initial "free seminars," according to the lawsuit, were "the first step in a bait and switch to induce prospective students to enroll in increasingly expensive seminars starting with the three-day $1495 seminar and ultimately [for] advanced seminars such as the 'Gold Elite' program costing $35,000."

"We're going to have professors that are absolutely terrific-terrific people, terrific brains, successful, the best," Trump claimed on videos shown at the seminars. "We're going to have the best of the best. And honestly, if you do not learn from them, if you do not learn from me ... then you're just not going to make it in terms of the world of success."

That was good enough for June Harris, of White Plains, New York, who had previously taken an online Trump real-estate investing course and found it useful. After the free June 2009 session at a hotel in Stamford, Connecticut-where participants were told to keep $1,000 in their pockets at all times as "a confidence builder for wealth"-Harris signed up for the three-day seminar, which cost her $747.50. She spent the weekend of June 19 at the seminar, where she was encouraged to call her credit-card company and increase her line of credit. "They said that we should invest in property without ever touching our own assets," she wrote in a September 2012 affidavit. "The instructor said if we surmounted the fear of losing money then we would actually make money."

She was then encouraged to sign up for the "Trump Gold" mentorship program-at a cost of $35,000-described as a yearlong group of seminars and private consultations with Trump instructors. When Harris declined, "The agent was very upset and quickly hung up the phone on me," she wrote in her affidavit.

Bob Guillo, from Manhasset, New York, and his son, Alex, fell hard for the Trump line. After the free seminar and the three-day course costing nearly $1,500-and which he graded as "excellent" in his evaluation-Guillo signed up for the Trump Gold Elite program and paid nearly $35,000. He was told he would be part of a select "in-the-know group" and among "insiders" who would have access to proprietary real-estate deals. "For example," Guillo wrote in an affidavit, "where Mr. Trump would be involved in building condominiums, we would get first choice at purchasing an apartment and then would be able to immediately sell it at a profit."

Guillo wrote that at the first day of the Trump Gold Elite program he "began to realize I had been taken" because the information conveyed seemed to be coming from Zillow.com, a real-estate Web site, or from the I.R.S. Web site. In August 2011, Guillo wrote George Sorial, an assistant general counsel in the Trump Organization, to request a refund. But he never got his money back. Instead, "Trump staff promised to set me up with their best mentor," Guillo wrote. He declined the offer. He just wanted his money back.

Guillo, now 74 years old and a retired legal-document processor, says he attended every one of the seminars his $35,000 bought him and at every one the Trump instructors did the same thing. "They tried to solicit more money from us," he explains. "I got a picture of myself with a Trump cutout and basically very, very little else."

Trump is unmoved by the people who have complained. He and his legal advisers set up a Web site, 98percentapproval.com, which contains video testimonials from satisfied customers, as well as more than 10,000 attendee surveys, many of which give Trump top marks. "It's like Harvard," Trump tells me. "You know Harvard doesn't have a 98 percent approval rating." Alan Garten, an executive vice president of the Trump Organization and litigation counsel, interjects, "When you take into account the fact that the attorney general's been looking at this case for what, two-plus years, 46 [negative] affidavits is [nothing]."

Trump quickly picks up on Garten's observation. "Of those 46," The Donald says, "most of them have signed a letter saying how great it was... They complained that they weren't given refunds, except they were."

What about Bob Guillo, who has not received a refund? "I had many conversations with Bob Guillo," says Sorial. "He could not articulate one thing that was wrong with the course. And I just got the impression that this was a guy who read about this frivolous lawsuit and was saying, 'Hey, look. I'm going to try and get some money back.' Especially because he signed up for multiple courses in multiple years, and had multiple, very positive evaluations."

Schneiderman is not persuaded by such arguments. "All the promotional materials, many of which featured Mr. Trump, made numerous false statements," he explains. "He never 'handpicked' experts to teach people. These people weren't experts. They weren't even certified as teachers by the state of New York. They didn't learn any real-estate secrets from Trump, because he never participated in developing the curriculum." (Trump says he personally reviewed the résumés of many but not all of the teachers.)

Trump is especially miffed that he is being tarred as a fraud. "I really did this because I thought we could really help a lot of people, and we did help a lot of people." He is determined to make the attorney general pay politically for his accusations and says his legal response "will blow Schneiderman out of the water."

Schneiderman responds, "I have no idea how he thinks his strategy is going to work." He adds, "The lawyers in my office are going to pursue it. I am quite confident we're going to prevail, and the rest of it is just distraction."

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Big Hair on Campus: Did Donald Trump Defraud Thousands of Real-Estate Students?

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Donald J. Trump has 2.43 million followers on Twitter, making him the 670th most followed person in the global Twitterverse. Last fall he was sandwiched there between Lonny Rashid Lynn Jr., better known as the Chicago-born hip-hop artist Common, and Alejandro Fernández, or El Potrillo, the Mexican singer.

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Manhattan, Brooklyn, New York, Real Estate, Homes For Sale, Properties, Apartments, Open Houses, Condos

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Manhattan, Brooklyn, New York, Real Estate, Homes For Sale, Properties, Apartments, Open Houses, Condos

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NYC Real Estate: Sales/Rentals | The Corcoran Group

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Discover the best New York City real estate. Premier Brooklyn and Manhattan homes for sale and top NYC rentals.