Most of you who read this blog know the story of Condofiasco.com
In case you don't there is a guy named Zack Preble who put down a deposit of $75,000 on a pre construction one bedroom condo in Miami back in 2005 at the peak of the boom. He hoped to flip the 375K unit to someone else before he even had to close on it. If sucessful he would have made a huge profit for basically doing nothing more than signing a contract.
The real estate market turned on Zack, and the closing date approached quicker and quicker while his condo dropped in value. He was facing a choice of either walking away from his life savings of 75,000 dollars or closing on a condo he could not afford (and was now worth only a fraction of what he agreed to pay)
It was kind of like Alien vs Predator... No matter who wins, he would lose.
Zack came up with a plan to sell shares of his condo for approx $35.00 to people who visited his website. He hoped that the investors buying the shares would allow him to hold on to the condo for a few years until the market turned around. Unfortunately the plan failed because he was only able to sell about 1,000 dollars worth of shares.
As the closing date approached (In January of 2008) Zack disappeared from his blog for a few months and no one knew what happened to him. Zack miraculously appeared in May with news that the closing date was now May 26th and that he now had a new scheme. He would try a reverse auction to sell his condo.
Watch the video here...
http://cbs4.com/video/?id=56004@wfor.dayport.com
Read the full article here.
Click here for the article
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Preble. He seems like a guy who just got a little carried away by greed and made a bad investment during the housing bubble like a lot of us did.
However, The Irony of this story is just getting started...
It turns out that Zack Preble is one of the founders of Foreclosure.com
I just find it ironic that a guy who makes a living off people losing their homes, ended up losing his own condo before he even moved in. ;)
I guess sometimes life really bites you in the balls.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Real Irony of the CondoFiasco story.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Great article man. Lifes a bitch!
Wow.
just...wow.
This is making fire extinguishers for your whole life and then dying because you don't have a fire extinguisher kind of irony :)
Ill say it then..
Zach wasn't content to do any sort of real productive work for a living. He wanted to get rich easily by speculating.
Fuck him He's an asshole and got his richly deserved rewards.
These are exactly the people that the government wants to help with the bailout money. By the way.... it's your money!
Investing in realeastate is like investing in the stock market. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. It's know ones fault but our own. Best way is to start out small with cash, and move up.
Most people want a fast big buck, like those risks with the stock market. Higher risk, higher profit. Who bails out bad stock investments? Be wise!
Post a Comment