Hurricane Housepoor

From the Herald Tribune in Sarasota, we have: Buyers in a bind.

After struggling home builder Jade Homes suddenly closed its doors last month, buyers of about 75 homes found themselves in difficult straits.

Ali Alshalkmi is a Tampa businessman who bought 10 homes at a total cost of about $3 million for himself and members of his extended family. He deposited $200,000 with Jade last year.

Three of the homes were never begun and seven others are in varying stages of partial construction.

"I must have left 200 messages," said Alshalkmi, before retaining Mike Mardis, a Tampa litigator with the firm of Siver, Barlow & Watson.

"They never returned the call."

Shawn Stumpf, his wife, Kristy, and their two small children expected to soon move into their new Jade home in North Port. They sold their former house last year to make the $50,000 deposit on a $326,000 Jade house at 1733 Kadashow Drive.

The Stumpfs are now living with Shawn Stumpf's mother.

The day after the story broke, the plumbing contractor returned to the house and "cut out all the fixtures he could" from the nearly complete installation, said Stumpf, a Verizon repairman.

Odeimist Torres, who is 61/2 months pregnant with her second child, has been living in a rented home because her North Port home is unfinished. Materials, including dry wall, have been removed, she said.

Her parents and her brother, Jose Navarro, also bought nearby homes that are basically complete but need a certificate of occupancy for the owners to move in.

Let's see...

We have: a speculator buying 10 houses (with eye-popping 15:1 leverage,) 7 of which are incomplete (and rotting in the rain); the company has decamped with the money; the contractors are stealing fixtures and dry walls; a pregnant lady is speculating, and so are her siblings, and parents!

I want to remind readers that, as reported by Motoko Rich, the dumb bitch from the New York Times, "South Florida is working off of a totally new economic model than any of us have ever experienced in the past."

For the record, the last time Florida "worked off a totally new economic model" was in 1926. Prices did not recover (in inflation-adjusted terms) till the mid-80's!