Long Beach Own Your Own (OYO) Owners are Organizing for Condo Conversion

Laurie,

Thanks for the post. Good to see you here in the Rain. What exactly is a "Own Your Own"?

Laurie, What a bureacratic quagmire!  I hope that the higher ups champion this cause and some relief for these OYO owners will be forthcoming soon. How does the GOV stand onthe issue?

Ginger

William, the link in the 1st paragraph leads to an article that describes the Own Your Own form of ownership and the financing challenges they are facing. 

Ginger,

Yes it is a mess.  It is in the hands of the State at the moment.  They denied the last attempt.  Now the owners are organizing to face the challenges together and pool their manpower resources.  Apparently a tenants rights group derailed their last attempt.

Typical bureaucracy I hope this is resolved we have enough trouble financing condos here that are not on the " Approved list"

Hey Laurie,

As if we don't have enough issues on the table...honestly, do they have to make everything so D$%^ difficult? Nice to see you around : )

I hope this finds the attention it deserves - how frustrating

Terry, Kelli and Thesa,

Normally when a tenants rights group gets going its about rental apartments converting to condos, none of which were individually owned.  This is different.  These units are individually owned and have been for some time.  Becaue of the ridiculous and outdated laws many cannot convert away from this stale status and the clear majority have had no choice but to move on and just rent them out. 

It seems that the tenants rights groups would like to keep these as rentals, without regard for the finances of the owners.  It has gone on for so long that many of these buildings have fallen into disrepair and none have been updated, the income to facilitate this is just not there. These are quickly becoming sub-standard housing - something has to be done about it.

Unfortunately Long Beach is running short on rental units because of the volume of condo conversions that had been approved causing a large net loss of rental units as they were sold. 

The city residents have been plagued by large numers of foreclosures forcing people out of their homes and back into rent which is further erroding our vacancy rate.  New builds are all high end, lets face it if you couldn't pay your mortgage you aren't going to be able to afford the rent, in many cases its larger than most of these peoples mortgages were. 

Maybe we just have the wrong inmates running the asylum. Hmmmm, elections coming up?

Laurie - This is very interesting, We don't have anything like this in my part of the country, so I'm curious about how this can happen. Thanks for the education.

Hi Laurie -

Thanks for the education on this.  We have some OYOs in Laguna Woods, but since I don't sell that area, I have never really looked into it.  I'm very sympathetic to the situation that these frustrated owners are dealing with.  I hope they can get the attention of our State and local officials and solve this problem.

This was great info, Laurie. My clients often find listings for OYOs when they're shopping in downtown Long Beach so this will be helpful in explaining those properties and the difficulties involved in purchasing them. That said, I did close an OYO last year, but had to use seller financing of course.