Sales Slow Going as Buyers Get Cold Feet on Condos
Orange County Business Journal, Feb 18-Feb 24, 2008 by Mueller, Mark
REAL ESTATE: Some builders halting sales, projects until market stabilizes
Scottsdale-based developer Geoffrey Edmunds usually flies from Arizona into John Wayne Airport one day a week to oversee construction of the condominium towers he’s building in Irvine with partner Opus West Corp. of Phoenix.
But on one trip this month, he didn’t spend his time looking over the progress of the 105 condos at 3000 The Plaza, the third and final high-rise his Geoffrey H. Edmunds & Associates Inc. is building with the Irvine office of Opus at the comer of Jamboree Road and Campus Drive.
Instead, Edmunds spent his time trying to sell just one of the condos.
After some hands-on negotiations with a potential buyer, he ended up closing a sale of a single condo at the 15-story building. The buyer was from Singapore and was looking for a second home-and planned to pay cash for condo.
“I negotiate some of the deals myself. Sometimes it helps for the builder to be there,” Edmunds said.
As is the case with more traditional singlefamily homebuilders-not to mention the nearly 15,000 Orange County homeowners who have their homes on the market-sales are a scarce commodity for the county’s crop of condo developers these days.
There are five towers in Irvine and Santa Ana under construction, totaling about 700 condos. Less than a quarter of those condos-which sell for $600,000 to nearly $2 million for penthouses-reportedly have been sold.
Sales for those condos have run from about $490 per square foot to $840 per square foot, according to data from the Costa Mesa office of Hanley Wood LLC. Reported sales figures for those projects actually have fallen since mid-summer, a result of increased cancellations.
One developer-Nexus Cos. of Santa Ana-late last year opted to halt sales altogether for Skyline at MacAithur Place, the pair of 25story towers it is building in its hometown, to wait for the buyers to come back to the market.
A renewed sales push from Nexus is expected to begin later this year.
Sales on Hold
At Irvine’s Central Park West development, Canada’s Inteigulf Development Group and Lennar Corp. of Miami have had limited success with sales at their two-tower Astoria project. Sales at the rest of the 40-acre development’s low- and mid-rise homes were put on hiatus until the maiket improves.
Slow sales locally also have indefinitely postponed a number of other big tower projects, including those on the books in Anaheim’s Platinum Triangle and Costa Mesa’s arts district A few towers proposed in Irvine around John Wayne Airport have been canceled altogether.
Several dozen towers still are on the drawing board across the county
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