With US real estate prices still on the way down, most would-be real estate investors are facing issues if they need to refinance a mortgage on a property they were renting out. The mortgage resets are not exclusive to residential buyers and a lot of investors are facing problems also. Refinancing a mortgage is the big issue currently, because, whatever mis-information might be being spread around by the banks and governments, credit markets remain tight.
A cliche, I know, but I was sent a press release recently that caught my attention. Regular readers will know I rarely publish press releases because of the unrealistic nature of the projections in most of them, but this one looks interesting.
It looks as though even the ruling family of Dubai is not immune to the stunning amount of lawsuits and court cases flying around the property investment world at the moment. An Iranian businessman is suing members of Dubai’s ruling family for close to two billion dollars over real estate investments, in a case which opened on Wednesday.
Looking to invest in U.S. real estate? Anyone looking for property investment advice is likely to be thinking about location, foreclosure sales, pricing, and how to properly assess what an investment will cost in terms of rehab and resale. You probably aren’t even thinking about property taxes, but you should be.
You can almost smell the desperation emanating from the UAE at the moment. The latest in a long line of cancelled projects is the “Salam,” a luxury hotel resort that had been planned om the beach front close to Bahrain’s formula one track. Bahrain’s Nass Corporation and South Africa’s Murray and Roberts Holdings were due to build the luxury resort in a joint venture.
More on Dubai Property Crash Spreading Across UAE – Luxury Resort Scrapped – Confidence Level Falls
A
ll successful scams and cons have two things in common:
1) All scams involve a ‘hook’ designed to play on our natural greed and opportunism by asking us to do something that seems only slightly unethical (on the surface) in exchange for a huge monetary pay off. 2) All scams then count on our shame at accepting illicit terms to make sure we don’t report the crime or pursue justice.
Swiss bank UBS said on Friday it had frozen a $6 billion real estate fund as it could not keep up with redemption requests from wealth management clients.
The Jersey-based UBS Wealth Management Global Property Fund will be closed until the end of 2009. “Due to the strained liquidity situation in the market as a whole and the longer process for selling real estate, the fund can no longer handle all redemption requests without forcing remaining investors to suffer losses from emergency sales,” a spokeswoman for UBS said, confirming a report in Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung.
Nobles Properties, the billion dollar real estate investment company launched by former Tameer Holding chief executive Omar Ayesh, will soon announce projects worth another $500 million in various parts of the Middle East

