About That Condo Market: Why We Love Latin America

Back (kicking and screaming) from San Francisco. Had a great chat Thursday with Richard Swerdlow and Adam Kujacznski of Condo.com.

If you own any condos, particularly investment condos, you may want to stop reading now and go get a drink (make it a double). The flipping game is over, says Swerdlow, CEO of Condo.com. There will be an enormous slowdown in the condo market because the investor mentality has gone away. (Look what happened Friday– meltdown.) Lenders are now requiring a larger deposit and qualifying buyers after the re-set–that is, qualifying folks at the higher rates they will have to pay down the road. (It was the low low interest rates, easy credit and low deposit requirements that created some of this mess–people holding contracts and never intending to move into condos.) However, Swerdlow says that game is over. His site is the world’s largest marketplace for condos with more than 400,000 listings. “We saw a global marketplace for condos–we connect buyers and sellers,” he says. Condos are the only real estate asset that are global, he says, and folks buy and sell condos sight unseen based on square footage; Realtors use them as well to list. Condo.com just merged with Terra Networks, the largest U.S. Hispanic portal and web access provider in Spain and Latin America, to launch a bilingual online condo marketplace. Oh, and P.S.: The Texas condo market is doing pretty darn well compared with other parts of the country thanks in large part to an influx of buyers from Latin America. Bravo.