Monday Update
Good morning everyone. I hope this message finds you well. Josh
and I have been in communication with the HOA committee over the weekend. They have
requested two weeks’ time to work internally with the five remaining unsigned
individuals. We appreciate your support and will continue to update the blog
with more current information and of course whenever a contract is signed.
Josh is out of the country for a week celebrating his
birthday with family and friends, but will still be available. The best time to
reach him will be in the early morning hours.
Feel free to contact me as well if you need a quicker
response (Josh didn’t take me with him).
There will be more updates soon. Stay positive!
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ReplyDelete🙋🏻🙋🏻🙋🏻 Replaced bathroom ceiling twice and all pipes in the bathroom. Total was around $5000.
DeleteI hate to hear all the issues that folks have had & I could jump in myself with a few, but seriously don't think it would convince the 5 remaining holdouts & wouldn't want more stories to dissuade the prospective buyers from closing the deal. Thanks
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ReplyDeleteNo, this will not convince the remaining unsigned. The issue for these owner-non-occupants is simply wanting more money, so they can increase their ROI to a percentage more massive than the percentage they currently will realize when they sign their contracts.
DeleteAs Josh said last night, they believe 4 of the 5 will sign this week. Some had legitimate issues for it taking longer for them to sign. It certainly appears that 216 is just being greedy and the reality is the building will sell with or without 216. If they want to risk getting less money by not signing then that's their problem.
DeleteI have owned my unit since the beginning, much like an earlier commenter it was my first real estate purchase and I lived there happily making life long friends and having great experiences. Since then I was approved to rent, got married, had a family and it has acted as that same cool place for a number of younger aged tenants. Things change and life goes on and after 17 years the building and its owners are being presented with a financially opportunity that in most cases will provide life altering opportunities none of us expected just 6 short weeks ago. My hope is in the next 2 weeks the remaining folks who have not signed realize this and join us on this journey. Money isn't everything but in this particular case it will positively impact so many folks who can use it. Sobu for me has done its job and now its time to move on.
ReplyDeleteAfter 16 years together, my husband and I finally decided to take the plunge this year, and purchase our first home together. Six weeks of labor, and probably driving our direct neighbors a bit crazy during the day, we renovated our unit to exactly what we envisioned. This condo wasn't just a nice place for us to call home... It was and is a physical representation of the years of trials, failures, and many months financial duress, overcome through perseverance and sticking together. When we moved in this summer, we had full intention of making this our home for a few years to come.
ReplyDeleteWhen this deal was put in front of us, it felt unreal. We have become so used to "just surviving," the thought of being able to have options beyond what we have ever had was overwhelming. This is exactly what we need for that tipping point towards financial stability. We now have options. Both of our mom's have heavy medical bills, from open heart surgery, shoulder, and now ankle surgery, and an impending surgery to prevent colon cancer. This would mean not only can we be stable enough to keep ourselves afloat, but also take care of our families when needed.
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ReplyDeleteLet's share some positive human interest around this. If the sale goes through, what good will it do for you, your family, or others?
ReplyDeleteLet's help the buyers feel like they're going to make a difference in the community, and maybe help Ebeneezer Scrooge come around.
I'll be able to invest more in my retirement, pay off some debt, and give more to others on a monthly basis. (I've been losing money monthly, even as a legal renter with no real problems in my top floor corner unit with windows I still miss.)
I'd like to be able to help others with their debt, too. We helped a refugee family resettle from Congo (the most dangerous country in the world for women), and they have the debt of their airfare.
My parents are both working in their mid 70s and I'd like to be able to visit them more than once a year. I wish the offer was more, so I could help them pay off their house, but I'm not an investor and I'm not looking to be compensated any more than anyone else.
I'd like to be able to give more to help animals in need.
I'd like to be able to give more to my alma mater, so maybe one fewer college student would not have to eat ramen and sell plasma, like I did.
I'd like to give to the community garden that my father-in-law stated that now feeds over 500 families each summer with fresh vegetables.
I'd like to spend more time finding things I can give to that will make a difference.
Selling Sobu would help me do more good on the world.
An open letter to Robert Collins/Skyview Media, LLC:
DeleteDear Mr. Collins -
I'm writing to you to offer my perspective on the possible sale of Sobu Flats and to encourage you to agree to the offer that is currently on the table. I'm sure you have your reasons for holding out, but I'm hoping you'll find my reasons for eagerly signing up at least informative, if not compelling. My perspective is somewhat unique in that I am both an owner and, until fairly recently, the president of the HOA board.
In early 2007, I had just begun dating my now wife. At some point during the Spring of that year, she began looking for a condo to buy. With the help of a friend who was a real estate agent, she'd managed to narrow it down to two possibilities, and she asked me to have a look at both. One was in Inman Park, a great neighborhood, but the exterior looked run down to the point that I half-joked that it might be in danger of collapsing. The other was Sobu Flats. We looked at the Sobu unit, and I immediately said "Buy this one. This is the one." She followed my (completely unqualified) advice and moved in in June.
Not long after she had unpacked, the first assemblage attempt got underway. It seemed like a dream come true - in a matter of months, she stood to make a very substantial profit. It was an exciting time. When the effort eventually failed, it was very disappointing, but not earth-shattering - the potential sale had been completely unexpected, and the place was still a comfortable, safe place to live in a great location. There were some signs of problems - the Great Recession was getting underway, and the board had opted to avoid strict enforcement of rules and dues in an effort to prevent foreclosures, and amenities, such as the concierge and on-site security, had to be pared back, but things were okay. Weird little incidents happened every so often, like some of the framed photos in the lobby going missing, but they were annoyances rather than actual problems.
Eventually, I moved in. The little annoyances kept piling up, edging closer and closer to "real problem" status. The parking gate got stuck open a lot. The trash compactor seemed to overflow or otherwise break every other week. The quality of the groundskeeping became increasingly spotty. People were getting stuck in the elevators. A leak started in the ceiling above one of our bathrooms, a problem that wouldn't be repaired for years as we went back and forth with our upstairs neighbor about who was responsible and how it should be addressed. Finally, we had to rip a hole in our ceiling to figure out that it had been his toilet's drain pipe that had been the problem all along - not a fun discovery. A few thousand dollars of repairs made things mostly right, though there are troubling signs that there's still a moisture problem in that area.
Somewhere along the way, we had to fix a plumbing problem of our own and learned that the building's pipes hadn't been replaced when it was renovated in the 1990s - they were the original galvanized steel from the 1950s, and galvanized steel pipes don't age well. As we told neighbors about the issue we'd had with the leak from above, we found it was much more common for them to say "I have the same problem!" than something like "That's a shame. I haven't had any leaks."
Time marched on. We got married in 2010 and had our first child, a daughter, in 2014. During that time, I joined the board. I came in with tons of ideas for improvements to the property. We'd bring back on-site security. We'd clean up the backyard area. We'd whip things into shape. It seemed simple - I couldn't understand why no one had gotten things back to where they had been before the recession. It didn't take long to find out - there was no money...
(cont'd)
DeleteEverything, even basic enforcement of community rules, would take money. Little stuff, like an overflowing dumpster, people not cleaning up after their dogs or parking in the wrong place, and misusing the common areas happens because there's no one whose job it is to keep an eye out for such things. What's worse, bigger things, like a homeless person living in our basement for an unknown length of time, a resident chasing away his associates at gunpoint in broad daylight, packages being vandalized and stolen, unexplained pools of blood showing up in the laundry room on a Sunday morning, and car break-ins and thefts are the same way. I can't say for sure that on-site security would have stopped all of those things, but the lack of it certainly hasn't helped.
Even ignoring the big things, which is hard to do, all of the little things have started to have a real effect on the condition of the property - it has started to look worn and haggard. That look is more than skin deep, as I'm sure you've heard. Plumbing problems are a near constant source of frustration, and they go beyond individual units - the building's entire plumbing system is deteriorating dangerously, along with the roof. As our daughter has gotten bigger, my wife and I have often discussed selling our unit and finding something better suited for our family, but we've always been stopped short by the realization that we'd be hard pressed to break even, let alone make any money to put toward a new place. Our next-door neighbor wanted to sell and had a buyer, but the buyer struggled to get a loan because the HOA had too little cash in reserve. More and more, our once comfortable and pleasant home seemed more like an increasingly dangerous trap we couldn't escape... until this deal came along.
Under the terms of the current offer, we stand to make far more than we could ever hope to selling our unit individually. Instead of fighting to break even, we stand to make a substantial profit that will immediately transform our lives for the better. In addition to paying off our mortgage, we will immediately be able to pay off the student loans we'd resigned ourselves to carrying for the rest of our lives. We will have a year to find a new place to live, saving all of the money we would otherwise be spending on mortgage payments and HOA dues, and our search for a new home won't be hemmed in by debt. Our second child will be born in June, and we have a very real chance to welcome him or her into the world completely debt free.
This deal will make our lives better to an incredible degree, and we're not alone. While each owner will realize a different return on their original investment, many, if not most, of us will come out of this deal on a much better financial footing than we are now. Even though some owners will see only modest gains, they will be freed from continued responsibility for a property that needs more repairs than we are in a position to fund - repairs that will only prevent things from getting worse, not make them significantly better. The building is surrounded by newer, fancier properties, with more going up all around us, making our property look much worse in the inevitable comparisons. At a time when it seems like everything is stacked against getting out of Sobu at anything other than a loss, we've all been handed an offer for significantly more than market value.
I simply can't overstate how big a deal this is for my family, and as I said above, I know we're not alone. I'm sure you have your reasons for not jumping on the deal immediately, and I respect that, but I hope you will take into account how much this will mean to all of the other owners at Sobu.
Thanks,
Aaron Karp
Who are these people
ReplyDelete: 216, 511 and 816? What do they want? They DON'T live here!!!!