The owners of the iconic Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in New York are handing over the keys to the giant middle-class housing project in Manhattan.
When individual homeowners can’t pay their mortgage bills and creditors have to step in, they call it a “foreclosure.” When investment companies can’t pay their mortgage bills, they call it “debt” and they “turn over the properties to creditors.”
But they’re basically the same thing — and, boy, is this a real-estate whopper for the ages. The owners spent $5.4 billion to buy and renovate 110 buildings and 11,227 apartments. They purchased the project at the top of the market in 2006.
No matter what bad real-estate thing happens to you this week — whether you’re a buyer, seller, broker, agent, renter, financier, developer — it’s going to be hard to top this blunder. Just remember that.
File under: Wow!
