David Sutta – MIAMI (CBS4)

For decades, South Florida has been proud of being a piece of paradise where you could raise a family, perhaps retire. In the last couple of years, calling the region home has changed dramatically, where more people are moving out than moving in.

The Bank of America building in downtown Miami was once known in the 1980′s as the Centrust Tower when it eventually faced bankruptcy and a city in turmoil.

It still lights up the skyline, reinvented and thriving. Dozens of skyscrapers have popped up, and dozens more are on the way. The question posed is while this city appears to be headed to greatness, will the people who made South Florida still live here when all this is done?

Florida has been faced with more foreclosures in 2007 than 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992 combined. The year 2007 was a record.

In Broward County, foreclosures in 2006 were 8,995; in 2007, it was 23,476. For Miami-Dade County, there were 9,814 foreclosures in 2006; in 2007, there were 26,338.

Every week, inside our county courthouses, banks try to sell hundreds of foreclosed homes. Some of them are half off, most of them with little success.

ON THE EDGE

One foreclosure affects Cathi DeThomas.

“When we bought this house, we were to stay here for 10 years hopefully build enough equity with the improvement and sell it for a profit and hopefully have a little nest egg for retirement.”

But now, foreclosure is what affects Cathi DeThomas, who took out an adjustable rate mortgage.

“They qualified me for the loan just by my credit score alone,” she said.

Worried she would be priced out of South Florida, DeThomas took the mortgage.

In 2003, her Deerfield home appraised for $400,000; today, it’s going for $250,000 and on the market for four months without a single offer.

“The idea of going into foreclosure, for me, from a midwestern viewpoint is ‘you just don’t do that’.”

Despite her best efforts, she just missed her first mortgage payment.

“I don’t think I’ll ever have the possibility of owning a home down here again or anywhere else for that matter. And at my age, that is even more depressing because you know if I was my son’s age it would be different. You can recover. You can build up again. You can give it another shot. But I’m at a point in my life where you don’t get that many more shots.”

DESPERATE TIMES

In April of 2005, the Miami-Dade Housing Authority created a list for anyone who needed affordable housing. Forty-thousand people signed up. Three years later, 25,000 on the list are still waiting for a phone call.

Cassandra is one of the lucky ones. “I never fathomed that we would find ourselves in this situation,” she said.

Cassandra got help from the housing authority, where she was set up in Section 8 housing after a landlord stole their money and her husband lost his job in the construction market.

She added, “The situation is either here or our van. And we are a family of four and we can’t very well stay in our van.”

In a modest South Florida home, Cassandra is raising her family and losing sleep over it, “because it’s not comfortable. This is not our house.”

Ironically, Cassandra is living in a foreclosed home. The house is a bank- owned foreclosure.

“Any time between Monday and Friday, nine to five is the most nerve racking, because, of course, the city is open and operable.”

The location, “New Locks”, empowered by a community activist, Max Rameau, who views himself as a modern day Robin Hood.

He said “We’re liberating units. We’re not stealing anything. These places are locked up and enslaved and we are liberating them.”

So far, Rameau has “liberated” a half a dozen foreclosures to struggling families. He has plans for dozens more despite threats from the law.

“I think the law, while the law certainly has some value, I think there are times when you can’t obey the law. If slavery were legal, I think we would be obligated to disobey slavery. Now we have vacant housing while there are homeless people with children living on the street. I think we have obligation to make those units available.”

Rameau added, “We need to take back land. We need to take back housing. And we need to take control of our own destiny and our own situation.”

Cassandra added, “There are a lot of government entities that are set up and designed to help us but they don’t really want to do that. Their hearts are not really there. They are just there for a paycheck and we found that out the hard way.”

THE EXODUS

Then, there are those who fled to Greenville, South Carolina.

At a printing press plant about 100 miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, dozens of South Floridians are hard at work.

Larry Kudeviz of Genesis Printing said, “I tried to stay in South Florida. I don’t think anyone I talked to really thought I was going to move.”

In 2007, during South Florida’s record year for foreclosures, Larry Kudeviz decided he had enough.

“Listen. If you can’t afford to live, and you can’t afford to pay your taxes, and you’re living week to week or less than week to week, you’re not happy. You can’t say this on camera, but you walk somewhere and you say hi and they say an ‘expletive’. They grumble. But here you smile and everyone says hello.”

Alongside Kudeviz is Heratio and Mario – both from Miami.

Kudeviz moved not just himself, but 120 jobs out of Hialeah. Employees were given the opportunity to follow him to South Carolina. Dozens did in pursuit of something they couldn’t afford in Florida, the American dream.

Jorge Sierra is a Genesis employee and said, “I think we are going to find it. My wife is pregnant here. We are going to have a boy in South Carolina.”

Jorge is earning as much as he did in South Florida. The difference: he can find a home he can afford.

Fritzi Barbour, a Coldwell Banker broker, showed what $182,500 gets a buyer: a 22,000-square-foot house with a backyard. She added, “And in our market, the average-priced home is around 186-187-thousand.”

Is Genesis’ exit out of South Florida just the tip of an exodus?

Barbour added, “It kind of started slowly and none of us realized it was happening until all of the sudden every broker that I know had people in their office out showing property to families from Florida.”

Patrick Mason owns “Carolina Living,” a magazine that markets to people from out of town. His research shows for the first time ever that Florida is now the number one exporter of people to South Carolina.

“People are seeking good value,” Mason said. “They are leaving high cost regions and looking for reasonable cost regions.”

Speaking about life in Florida’s foreclosure capital, Kudeviz xplained, “South Florida has a real big issue. What’s going to be of it? I don’t know. I’m not a fortune teller. But I know I wasn’t going to wait around to be a byproduct of what happened. I am going to make my own destiny.”

Where American dreams are struggling, DeThomas said, “I don’t think the middle class can survive here. Your nurses and teachers and postal workers, and all of our middle professional people who aren’t upper management, it’s like we don’t have an option.”

She reiterates a common theme in today’s economy that people are caught in the middle.

“Every day it’s getting worse. Every hour it’s getting worse. It’s getting harder and harder for people to survive. There are people who commit suicide over the same situation. It’s just that serious.”

By the numbers, South Florida appears to be in a state of metamorphosis. Its middle class is leaving, and quickly being replaced by a wealthier class. People may have to be wealthier not only to survive in South Florida, but to thrive.

The working class is either on the verge of losing everything, struggling to survive or just leaving. The gap will continue to widen between the have’s and the have not’s unless something is done to stop it.

Next week: A look at how South Florida became so unaffordable in a matter of four years, then, some solutions of how future generations will be able to live here.

“Significant Numbers” of Lenders Have Tightened Credit Standards, Survey Shows

By CHARLES HERMAN – ABC NEWS Business Unit

If you’re a would-be homeowner, brace yourself for some bad news.

The Federal Reserve on Monday released a survey showing that “significant numbers” of lenders have tightened their standards for mortgage applicants.

The Fed’s survey, which polled loan officers at 56 domestic banks and 23 foreign banking institutions, found that for a “prime” loan, 55 percent of domestic lenders, compared with 40 percent in October, have increased their scrutiny of potential borrowers. And if you are looking for a non-traditional loan like a subprime or an interest-only, 85 percent of the banks that issued these loans are making it harder to get one, up from 60 percent in October.

Looking for a home equity line of credit? That’s going to be tougher to get as well.

Banks are even tightening lending standards for loans other than credit cards.

And as banks make it harder to borrow, loan officers report that demand for loans has decreased  consumers may realize it’s harder to get a loan and they may be worried about purchasing a big-ticket item like a home when the economy may be in or headed toward a recession.

The loan officers said lenders want to help homeowners struggling with their mortgages, but doing so could be difficult. Some homeowners may be hard to contact and others might not be interested in even staying as their homes drop in value. Also, a shortage of bank employees knowledgeable in completing this type of work could also prevent the bank from finalizing any work-outs with struggling homeowners.

A majority of lenders expect current mortgages, lines of credit, even credit card and other loans to “deteriorate” in 2008, meaning the lenders expect people to struggle to make their regular payments.

Lenders also reported that 80 percent of domestic banks have tightened standards for commercial real estate loans, the highest proportion on record since the question was first posed 18 years ago.

More and more borrowers are watching their house values sink while the cost of their loans skyrockets. What to do? Skip out on the mortgage all together.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Mortgage payments are set to jump. Home prices have plunged. “I’m outta here.”

Homeowners are abandoning their homes and, more importantly, their mortgages, rather than trying to keep up with rising payments on deteriorating assets. So many people are handing their keys back to lenders that a new term has been coined for it: jingle mail.

“I stopped paying my mortgage in October, after shelling out about $70,000 in interest [over 15 months],” said one borrower, David, who doesn’t want his last name used. “Now, I’m just waiting for the default notice.”

The Los Angeles-based writer bought two properties in Hancock Park, west of downtown, using no-down, interest-only mortgages in 2006. He paid just over $1 million for both.

David had planned to sell them quickly but got caught in the slump. Soon his interest rate will jump by a few points, and his payments will go up by several hundred dollars a month for each place. He figures his properties have fallen in value by at least $60,000 each.

Current lending practices have created an environment where a measure as extreme as abandoning a home actually makes sense to some people.

Many buyers put little or no money down, so they don’t have much invested in them. That leaves them with little incentive to keep making payments when a home’s market value dips below the balance of the mortgage.

The most serious consequence is a tremendous hit to credit scores. For some, that’s better than throwing away money they’ll never recover by selling their home.

And while a mortgage default can savage a person’s credit record, trying to pay off a loan they can’t afford could be worse for borrowers if it leads to bankruptcy, said Craig Watts, a spokesman for the credit reporting firm Fair Isaac.

Credit scores are hurt much more by missing multiple payments – on credit cards, cars and so on – than by a single foreclosure.

“The time it takes to regain your credit score [after foreclosure] can be shorter than after bankruptcy,” said Watts.

It typically takes three years of a spotless payment record after a bankruptcy before credit scores recover enough for someone to think about buying a home again, he said. After abandoning a mortgage, a person may be able to buy a new house in two years or less.

And now skipping out on a home is easier, thanks to the Mortgage Debt Relief Act of 2007. Previously, if a bank sold a foreclosed home for less than the mortgage balance and it forgave the difference, the borrower had to pay tax on that difference as if it were income. Now the IRS will ignore it.

“That’s going to help a lot of people,” said Mike Gray, a San Jose accountant who runs the web site Realestatetaxletter.com.

The trend of walking away is most pronounced among real estate investors, according to Jay Brinkman, an economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).

But families are doing it too. “If they have to stretch to make mortgage payments for a home that will not recover its value, then yes, they may walk away,” he said.

Often they chose hybrid adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) that came with low initial payments. After a few years, interest rates on these loans reset higher. But buyers thought they could count on the increased value of their homes to refinance into affordable, fixed-rate loans.

Now, that may not be possible. Take Susan (not her real name), a client of HouseBuyerNetwork.com, which specializes in arranging short sales. A short sale is when a bank agrees to accept the sale price paid for a home – even if it is less than the outstanding mortgage on it – as payment in full. An owner might sell a house with a $200,000 mortgage for $180,000, and then the bank forgives the difference.

HouseBuyerNetwork.com CEO Duane LeGate says that Susan’s two-bedroom condo in Sonoma County is worth $340,000, but the mortgage balance is $380,000. She can’t refinance and it’s difficult to sell.

She’s still trying for a short sale but, said LeGate, “She’ll almost certainly end up walking away.”

Beyond anecdotes, some statistics indicate that hard-pressed owners are deliberately courting foreclosure. An analysis by the consumer credit rating agency Experian last spring found that many borrowers were choosing to pay off credit card and other consumer debt before making mortgage payments. They were electing to put their mortgage at risk rather than their credit cards or auto loans.

Similarly, Richard DeKaser, chief economist for National City Corp., notes that while all credit metrics are deteriorating, mortgage delinquencies are rising disproportionately. “That makes sense if people are choosing to walk away,” he said.

And now reports are emerging of homeowners skipping out on mortgages even though they can still afford to pay them.

Wachovia CEO Ken Thompson described these people on an earnings call last month.”[These are] people that have otherwise had the capacity to pay, but have basically just decided not to, because they feel like they’ve lost equity, value in their properties.”

Lenders are afraid that borrowers may find it’s worth the hit to their credit scores, if they can drastically reduce their housing expenses. Someone with good credit and a $600,000 home in a town with cratering real estate prices could buy a similar house nearby for $450,000, and then let the other $600,000 mortgage go into foreclosure.

The stage is set for this kind of thing particularly in California, where huge numbers of buyers used low or no-down deals to buy homes. The trend has even spawned at least one new business, San Diego-based YouWalkAway.com, which for a fee of $1,000 purports to guide clients through the process of ditching their mortgages. It launched in early January, and says it has already signed up 180 clients.

California is a bit of a safe haven for these borrowers, since banks that repossess and then sell a foreclosed property for less than the mortgage that was owed on it cannot come after borrowers for the difference – as long as it’s the initial mortgage, one that has not been refinanced. So if a borrower owes $200,000 and the bank sells the house for $170,000, the borrower comes out of it debt-free.

And for many homeowners, the prospect of becoming debt-free is growing increasingly alluring.

Six years of economic growth have led to pent-up demand.

BY THERESA BRADLEY – © Associated Press – Miami Herald

In her bustling real estate brokerage, Ana Laura Pulido is doing her best business in years, enjoying a sort of Mexican immunity from the U.S. housing crash.”It’s a time of hope,” said Pulido, who has sold hundreds of homes to middle-income families since 1992. “The buyer today is more aware. People buy with more ease; they can plan long-term.”

Long thrashed by swings in the U.S. economy, Mexico now boasts a thriving housing sector whose record growth leads Latin America — a sign of increased economic stability and an outlet for investors looking to escape the U.S. downturn.

Giants including the California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest U.S. public pension fund, are already bankrolling projects in Mexico, where they see ”more bang for the buck,” said Clark McKinley, spokesman for CalPERS, which has invested more than $300 million in Mexican real estate funds.

EFFECT ON EMIGRATION

The trend could even slow emigration from Mexico, by generating millions in jobs and personal savings as a fresh supply of loans gives many their first chance to own a house.

President Felipe Calderon has set a national goal of a million new mortgages a year by 2010. He recently unveiled a set of measures to ensure growth continues, with plans to boost Mexico’s small resale market and combat the urban sprawl that has begun to carpet valleys with hundreds of thousands of matchbox row homes.

Behind the boom are six years of economic growth and stability — and a national shortage of 6 million dwellings. While interest rates are falling, just 6 percent of Mexico’s 25.7 million homes are financed with mortgages — compared with about 67 percent in the U.S. Most Mexicans still inherit their homes, buy them with cash, or build them by hand.

That pent-up mortgage demand in a nation of 108 million means lenders can be choosy, enforcing strict standards that held delinquency rates below 4 percent in third quarter-2007, compared to 5.6 percent in the U.S.

”Mexico is in the early stages of expansion,” said Juan P. De Mollein, managing director for Latin American structured finance at Standard & Poor’s. “There are still plenty of points for evolution because there’s still plenty of demand.”

NO SUBPRIME MARKET

In the United States, lenders looking to expand their portfolios granted risky mortgages to borrowers with weak credit, but in Mexico, that ”subprime” category doesn’t exist, because lenders don’t need it to grow. Also, few Mexicans flip homes or refinance mortgages, keeping the market more stable.

”Mexico doesn’t have a credit issue. We can still choose our borrowers because demand is so great,” said Mark Zaltzman, chief financial officer at Su Casita, one of Mexico’s largest mortgage lenders.

A recession north of the border could choke U.S. investment in Mexico, curbing job creation, discouraging new buyers and stalling housing growth.

But that won’t likely lead to mass layoffs and defaults, said Rafael Amiel, managing director for Latin America at the financial consultancy Global Insight. Mexico simply has too much room to grow, and expanding local markets have insulated it somewhat from U.S. downturns.

Housing demand could swell more as migrants are pushed home by the souring U.S. economy and crackdown on illegal immigration — generating four new jobs for every home raised, said Carlos Gutierrez, Mexico’s housing policy director.

All this represents a major change from 1994, when Mexico devalued the peso, sending inflation and interest rates soaring, forcing homeowners into default and pushing banks to the brink of collapse. Credit was so tight that most Mexicans paid cash or constructed their own homes, often adding one room at a time.

Since then, Mexico has seen a housing recovery built on a mix of government initiatives, private investment and a winning gamble by a new group of entrepreneurs who took a local approach to mortgage lending, using knowledge of family and neighborhood connections to make sure loans got paid.

Rather than build public housing, the government restructured mortgage-lending laws, setting stricter credit guidelines, standardizing appraisals and urging lenders to raise cash on financial markets. It also overhauled Infonavit, a public agency that grants more than half Mexico’s mortgages, funded by a 5 percent payroll tax. Some 20,000 jobs were outsourced as the agency more than doubled new loans to 458,700 in 2007, director Victor Borras said.

NONBANK LENDERS

And when commercial banks ran for the border, a new kind of lender stepped in, known as ”sofoles,” for the Spanish acronym for “limited financial association.”

Taking advantage of Mexico’s tight family ties and government credits, these nonbank mortgage lenders set up neighborhood offices, requiring relatives to co-sign loans and collecting late payments door-to-door, proving profits could be made.

Banks have since returned, and blossoming competition drove average 15-year mortgage rates to 12.5 percent in November — a deal in Mexico, where rates topped 65 percent in 1995. Construction is booming too, as just 30 percent of new homes were self-built by their owners last year, down from 50 percent in 2004, Gutierrez said.

While big banks target higher-income borrowers, sofoles are pioneering mortgages for street vendors and taxi drivers, who work in the huge informal economy without documented salary or credit histories. Sofoles study spending habits to establish borrowers’ income, offering trial payment periods to prove borrowers can afford payments on entry-level homes that range from $17,000 to $37,000.

Another huge potential market is the estimated 11 million Mexicans in the U.S., who can now buy ”cross-border” mortgages to pay off homes in Mexico, increasing their control over the earnings they send relatives and cutting the time they need to work in the U.S. to build a future back home.

Even as home lending soars, overall debt remains low, making a Mexican credit bubble unlikely. Major mortgage insurers, including U.S.-based AIG United Guaranty and Genworth Financial, now back Mexican loans, slashing risk and making it easier for lenders to bundle and sell debt to investors as mortgage-backed securities — raising capital to grant yet more loans.

Nearly $5.8 billion of these securities have been sold since 2003, offering investors an alternative to tumbling U.S. markets and giving Mexico’s nascent pension funds, which have relied on lower-yielding government bonds, a place to store assets long-term.

Mexico’s housing sector is still full of risks, including land ownership disputes, infrastructure delays and limited access to water. The emphasis on private building has concentrated developments in wealthier states, while masses of poorer people still live on dirt floors.

`A ROOF IS BEST’

Even so, millions of first-time home buyers now have an asset to leave their children, or to use as collateral to finance future spending, fueling growth.

”I always had in my head that the only thing you can give your kids as inheritance is an education and a house,” said Antonia Correa. The 37-year-old receptionist paid $7,200 down on a three-bedroom stucco town house in a sprawling new development in Cuautitlan, outside Mexico City.

”You could be short on things,” she said. “But a roof is the best. It’s your world, your home.”

BY MONICA HATCHER – © Miami Herald 2008
With more than a thousand foreclosed homes queued up for the auction block in February, the Miami-Dade County Clerk of Court’s office is expanding the number of days it auctions properties from two to three per week.

”We’ve been running into some serious problems,” said Michael Henderson, a spokesman for the clerk’s office. “We’ve needed [an extra day] now for a couple of months, because it is already unmanageable with two days and we expect the caseload to increase further.”

The extra auction day is expected to be added starting in March, most likely on Fridays. Henderson said the office was trying to find the resources to pay staff and make other arrangements for the change.

Huge numbers of foreclosures have made the extra day necessary. Nearly 320 homes are being auctioned weekly in Miami-Dade, as homeowners and investors go belly-up on spiking adjustable rate loan payments. Foreclosure filings in 2007 soared 168 percent over the year before.

While lenders are buying back most properties at the auctions, Henderson said the need to add an additional auction day was mainly out of concern for investors. Winning bidders must pay the full auction price for their purchases in cash by 3 p.m.

With auctions running later than usual, Julian Dominguez Jr., an investor and president of Foreclosure Information Systems, said the 3 p.m. time gives investors, who must put at least 5 percent down in cash upon winning a bid, only 90 minutes to get to the bank and return with the difference.

”It’ll make you nervous. If you’ve ever gone to the bank to have a cashier’s check made, you might get there and there’s 20 people in front of you,” Dominguez, said. ”By the time you’re out of there with your check, you’re stressed.” In Broward County, new filings have also prompted discussions about adding an extra auction day to alleviate the backlog, said Barbara Brown, court operations manager for the Broward Circuit, Civil and Family courts.

Right now, the court is asking lenders and banks to agree to extend sale dates by nearly a month. So far, that seems to be working, Brown said. Civil filings in Broward have jumped 102 percent since last year, said Brown, who added more than 90 percent of those filings were foreclosures.

”It’s never been like this, not for as long as I can remember,” Brown said. She pointed out the court has been auctioning about 240 properties per week since January, up from about 30 or 40 per week the same month last year.

A lawsuit from new Florida residents seeks to throw out Save Our Homes and the property tax amendment on Tuesday’s ballot, if voters approve it.

BY MARY ELLEN KLAS – MiamiHerald

Robert C. Bruner, Deborah Plitnick and Stanley C. Chamberlin don’t need Amendment 1 to pass on Tuesday to make their case that the state’s property tax system is unconstitutional.But, if voters approve the amendment, the three new Florida residents believe it strengthens the class action lawsuit they’ve already filed — and increases their chances of having a judge throw out the Save Our Homes provisions of the state Constitution.

Their claim: the portability portion of the amendment, which allows a long-time homeowner to transfer his tax savings to a new home, discriminates against newcomers to Florida and violates their state and federal constitutional right to equal protection, and the right to move from another state without facing economic harm.

”I’m standing in my backyard right now looking in my neighbor’s house, which is essentially the same,” said Chamberlin, of North Palm Beach, last week. “My neighbor pays about $8,000 in taxes and I pay $23,000, and it’s just not fair.”

Chamberlin, 72, is a retired New York stock broker who bought his home in 1999 but didn’t become a full-time resident of Florida until last year. He says that when Save Our Homes was passed in 1992, voters wanted to prevent sky-rocketing property values from taxing people out of their homes. But he believes it has gone too far.

”The taxes that I pay on this house are larger than my Social Security — which I worked my entire career to build up,” he said. “I’m one of the guys in theory they were trying to protect — a senior citizen on a fixed income — and it’s eating me alive.”

The lawsuit filed in Leon County Circuit Court on Nov. 21 claims the existing Save Our Homes cap on the taxable value of a home should be invalidated, and needs to be replaced with a more equitable system that doesn’t discriminate against newcomers. It also asks a judge to stop the implementation of Amendment 1, if voters approve it, because it worsens the inequities.

Chamberlin is joined in the lawsuit by Bruner, a former Indiana attorney general who bought his Tallahassee home in 2006, and Deborah Plitnick, who moved to Port Charlotte in 2005.

`REAL INEQUALITY’

”The reason it’s ripe right now is because the discrepancy and disparity has increased over the years so that it has created real inequity among the citizens,” said Doug Lyons, one of several lawyers working on behalf of the homeowners.

Another argument: the Save Our Homes annual cap on tax assessments amounts to a ”defacto residency requirement,” he said.

The Florida Supreme Court threw out residency requirements for property taxes in 1983, after the legislature imposed a 5-year residency requirement to qualify for the increased homestead exemption. Lyons and his legal team believe the court will do it again.

”The river has gotten too wide for the crossing and we need to find something that does provide equal protection and doesn’t discriminate against how long you’ve been living here,” he said.

Lyons and Tallahassee attorney Bill Owens are considering filing a second class action lawsuit against the state on behalf of Florida residents who are also new homebuyers but are locked into the highest tax bracket because of the law.

TAX EXPERT’S ADVICE

This legal battle was foreshadowed a year ago by University of Georgia professor Walter Hellerstein, a tax law expert hired by the Florida Legislature to evaluate the legal consequences of implementing Save Our Homes portability.

In his 93-page analysis, he warned lawmakers that if they didn’t find a way to offset the unfairness of the tax burden on first-time homeowners and newcomers to the state, Save Our Homes ”would be subject to substantial constitutional objections” and possibly struck down.

But Republican legislative leaders and Gov. Charlie Crist, who pushed for the constitutional amendment, disagree. ”They are wrong and we are right,” Crist said at a recent property tax rally in Miami. “It’s constitutional. I listen to Florida lawyers more than Georgia lawyers.”

Crist, who is an attorney, also offered this legal opinion: “We’re changing the constitution. How can it be more constitutional?”

But two of the legislature’s top lawyers have a different opinion. House Democratic Leader Dan Gelber, a former federal prosecutor who voted against putting amendment on the ballot, said Crist is “flat wrong.”

”The challenge isn’t a state constitutional challenge; it’s a federal constitutional challenge,” he said. “The lawyer the state hired to advise them warned us not to do exactly what we’re doing.”

Senate Democratic Leader Steve Geller, who voted for the amendment, believes that passage “clearly strengthens the lawsuit. The question is how much.”

Geller proposed an alternative that would have allowed people to keep their Save Our Homes savings when they moved, but would have phased it out over 10 years.

”I was told, `No, we’re not going to do it that way, and the [Senate] president’s — and mostly the governor’s — office said they are confident this version is constitutional,” he said.

One of the governor’s top legal advisors, former chief of staff George LeMieux, said Thursday that he and Crist’s general counsel Paul Huck advised the governor that “Save Our Homes has been challenged and upheld several times.”

Condo builder Jorge Perez said South Florida real estate is undervalued and he’s setting up a $1 billion fund to start buying properties.

BY MATTHEW HAGGMAN- Miami Herald

The condominium developer who led South Florida’s high-rise building boom is making a $1 billion bet that the region’s real estate market is a bargain.

Amid a slumping condo market, developer Jorge Perez is joining with a Wall Street firm to create an investor fund that will buy troubled mortgages and distressed property that ranges from raw land to finished condominium units in the southeastern United States. He will look at properties built by other developers as well as by his own Miami-based Related Group.

For months, investors have been pooling money and waiting to pounce on bargains prompted by overdevelopment, a tight credit market and overzealous investing in housing. This year is expected to be the time when opportunities arise, in part, because so many condo projects will start closings — and many jittery buyers are expected to walk away rather than close.

With $1 billion, Perez and his investors will rank among the most well-capitalized funds trolling for deals in the region, said real estate analyst Lew Goodkin, who is advising bargain hunters, though not Perez.

The moves of Perez, the biggest high-rise condo builder in Florida and among the biggest in the country, are closely watched in the industry because he has demonstrated a knack for spotting trends and quickly taking advantage of them. While his projects span from Argentina to Atlanta, he has built — or is building — 12 towers in Miami’s downtown and Brickell areas and several in Broward County, including Trump Hollywood in Hollywood and ICON Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale.

He said his decision to launch a vulture fund — or an ”opportunity fund” as he calls it — should be interpreted as a sign of confidence in South Florida’s condo market, not a reason for worry.

”I strongly believe that Miami real estate is undervalued,” Perez said. “Three years from now, people will look back and be amazed. Nevertheless, right now there are some people stuck in the middle of a loan who don’t have any cash and need to get rid of some inventory.

”We are going to try and take advantage of that situation,” Perez said.

He said the money is in place and contract details for the investor fund are being finalized this week. He declined to name his partner until the deal closes.

Perez, chairman and CEO of privately held Related Group, said his plan is premised on the long-term growth and success of the region’s real estate market: He’s buying when the market dips, using his financial strength to carry him through the downturn, and then riding it back up.

The plan, he said, is to focus primarily on properties in the Southeast, from Atlanta and Jacksonville to Miami, though he said there may be opportunities elsewhere in the country. Big chunks of unsold condos will be targeted.

Perez said the investor group intends to hold units for two to five years at a loss and then sell at a profit when, he bets, the market will have improved.

That means Perez would become a much bigger renter of apartments across the region, at least in the short-term. Perez, who was an apartment developer before building luxury condo units, said his company currently leases and manages 7,000 rental units and could handle renting many more.

The builder said the fund could also buy raw land or mortgages. ”Anything we think has value,” he said.

Creation of the fund also positions Perez with a ready source of capital to be used in purchasing his own units, if he chooses to do so, Goodkin said.

A big challenge for many builders is what to do with excess property in the down market. Typically, builders want to avoid hasty or high-profile sell-offs that undercut previous buyers or give the appearance of a fire sale. A highly capitalized fund with a joint venture partner can be an inviting alternative.

In November, Lennar, the Miami-based home builder that’s among the country’s biggest, announced it was joint-venturing with Morgan Stanley to buy, develop and sell real estate. Its first deal: buying Lennar-owned properties valued at $1.3 billion for $525 million.

Perez said he has not decided to use the investor fund to buy units that his company built — though he said he anticipates as many as 20 percent of his buyers may default on some of his projects. Perez has a host of large condo projects that will close in the next 12 months, including Brickell Avenue projects in Miami such as The Plaza and 500 Brickell.

The developer said he plans to rent unsold units in those projects himself, without the investor fund.

Still, ”[the fund] gives him a lot of flexibility in addressing inventory issues that he may have, as well as picking up distressed properties on the cheap,” Goodkin said.

Since the downturn, Perez has responded by launching more than 10 projects in Latin America in an attempt to diversify geographically. He also has been careful about starting new projects in South Florida; he recently canceled the proposed Loft 4 condo high-rise in downtown Miami and is still deciding whether to build another downtown project, Loft 3.