Top 10 Ways to Know Your Apartment Complex is GOING CONDO!
Top 10 Ways to Know Your Apartment Complex is GOING CONDO!(Do a search on Ceebraid Signal and Richard Schlesinger!)
10. Mysterious surveyors show up and start measuring and surveying in the parking lots.
9. The rental office is no longer working on weekends and no new apartments are rented.
8. Lots of foreign national work crews start moving into empty apartments--about 5 or 6 or even more people to one two-bedroom apartment.
7. A few weeks later, work trucks start taking up all of the parking spaces.
6. After 2 or 3 weeks the rental office is closed due to being "refurbished." The rental office is "temporarily" moved into an apartment and the staff is only working two days a week (sometimes). Upon asking rental staff if the apartment complex is going condo, the property managers are tight lipped and neither confirm nor deny.
4. About a month later, none of the remaining renters can get anything fixed in their apartments even though they are still expected to pay their rent in full and on time per Florida Statutes 83.
3. Work crews start painting the apartment buildings even though they were painted 6 months ago.
2. Work crews start taking out perfectly good plants and trees and bringing in new plants and trees to replace the old ones.
AND THE NUMBER ONE WAY TO KNOW YOUR APARTMENT COMPLEX IS GOING CONDO IIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSS...
1. The rental community is invited to a wine and cheese party by the hanging of a door tag with time and date. When they attend the party, the real estate sales people try to sell them their apartments AS IS for an eighth of a million dollars!!!
Ceebraid Signal is one management company that is turning all of their apartment complexes condo. This started last year with apartment complexes in Clearwater, Florida, namely the Audubon in Feather Sound and this company is now working on another transition from apartment to condo with the old Pelican Landing into the exclusive "The Club at Feather Sound." What a joke! These are apartments with no closet space to speak of, half of them were not even done when renters moved in them. This property is simply filled in swampland with mosquitos galore! The renters were told that they were getting a deal by purchasing them, as they would get a discount.
Richard Schlesinger, 61, a real estate mogul who lives in a $13-million oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, has owned apartment complexes in several states for years to include Connecticut, Pennsylvania and here in Florida. Ceebraid Signal's corporate office operates out of West Palm Beach. It takes a few minutes to even get a phone number of the office on the internet. The address of the corporate office is even harder to get and Dot (the kind lady who answered the phone today) did not want to give the address out when I told her I wanted to note my concerns to the corporate office in writing. It is like the corporate office operates in secret, like most apartment management companies these days.
Records show that Schlesinger has been sued several times and has been barred from participation in federal housing programs. That edict stems from a case in which he was ordered by the federal government in 2000 to pay a $500,000 fine after he admitted skimming money from a rundown Maryland apartment complex he owned. Back in 2003 he had problems with some local apartment complexes that he owned. This was noted by the St. Pete Times. Dependent children were not allowed to have entrance keys to get into the gated communities they lived in with their parents. When the kids came home from school some of that had no access to their homes. The argument by Ceebraid Signal was that only the leaseholders could have keys and that the parents had to put their children on the leases so they could get keys. The parents did not want to do this, as this made their minor or college aged children liable to pay rent for the entire lease period if anything happened to the parents. This Schlesinger sounds like a real honey of a guy, one who is motivated by money and definitely not motivated by doing the right thing by his tenants.
Please see:
http://www.nbnnews.com/NBN/textonly/2003-04-28/printall.html
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/06/03/NorthPinellas/Gate_stops_teens__ang.shtml
So now he is displacing many renters in this metro community by turning his apartments into condos and charging an eighth of a million dollars for 1185 square feet and no closet space, mosquitos, swampland and sinkholes on the property and selling these units AS IS to the present tenants. We were told that the units were going for $170,000 but with our discount for being long term tenants, they would work us a deal for $155,000 and some change. And on top of the paying a hefty mortgage, we were told we would need to pay approximately $250 in condo fees a month.
Low and behold, we just noticed the billboard today right on the northeast corner of Feather Sound Blvd and Ulmerton Road, right before the Howard Frankland Bridge. The billboard states the same price we were quoted, even though we are present tenants, have lived there for over 3 years and always paid our rent on time. The salespeople led us to believe that we, as long term tenants paying high rent that increased every year, were getting a deal with a wonderful discount offered to us as an incentive to buy our unit. How clever! And to add further insult to injury, anyone coming in off the street to buy gets a refurbished unit for the same price!
Schlesinger prides himself on being a good guy and says he is donating several thousand dollars for each unit he sells to Make a Wish Foundation or some other charity or worthwhile organization and there has been quite a media brouhaha with press releases flying about over this. He can donate to these organizations which really is a fine thing to do, but disregard and disenfranchise the people who are making him richer?
Everyone knows what his true motivation is! But I mean, really, come on! Who is he kidding?
posted by Zalala @ 4/14/2005 11:05:00 PM
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