Surfside Condo Collapse Impact On Retail Condo Market In South Florida

Watch Roy Oppenheim discuss the Surfside Condo collapse and what it means to the retail condo market in South Florida!

Read the full Transcript here:

Hi, this is Attorney Roy Oppenheim again. I’m here to talk today about what we can expect from the impact of the collapse of the Surfside condominium, the Champlain South condominium that occurred over the past few weeks. And of course, our hearts go out to everyone that has suffered a loss. And it’s just been very tragic. We, as a firm, have friends of friends who were in the building, and it’s just a very, very tragic loss.

But I think, to some extent, in my mind, this is a little bit like the Hindenburg moment in the South Florida condominium real estate market, especially the older buildings. And what I’m saying is that many of these buildings have not been properly maintained. They don’t have the proper reserves. Over the years, the condo unit owners have stubbornly resisted paying for assessments that the board of directors and management and advisors have suggested or required these buildings to do. And this is a consequence of when you have compounded neglect.

And I’m just not sure if the condominium organizational structure, maybe even the co-op organizational structure, is going to work, where you’re going to have assessments, sometimes as much as $80,000, $100,000, or $200,000. There are professional management companies’ engineers have suggested that the Champlain condominium, that the assessments should have been somewhere totaling $80,000 to $200,000 per unit. And of course, that’s almost an impossible amount, especially if someone only paid $300,000 for the unit years ago. Many of them are retired. Many are on fixed income. And so the problem is how do you reconcile this gap of maintaining a building with safety and security.

Ultimately, what’s going to happen is, if, in fact, the building cannot raise the necessary money to restore and rebuild and manage the safety of the building, those buildings will get condemned. And in fact, over the years, there have been a few buildings, in Miami in particular, where the city and the county has come in and thrown everyone out of the building, and basically, determined that the building was unsafe.

And so it’s going to be very interesting to see how, as a community, we’re going to be addressing these issues about condominiums that have serious, serious defects and require serious maintenance, and whether or not the unit owners are going to have the capacity and ability to raise those kinds of funds. And so if you’re gonna be buying or selling a condo in the future, you best have proper counsel. You better be looking at the engineering reports, looking at the board of director’s minutes before you jump into these deals. And particularly, realtors should be very concerned about what advice they’re going to provide their clients during this period of time.

So if you have any questions, feel free to call me, Roy Oppenheim for Oppenheim Law, in the trenches. Have a great day. Thank you.