To our Canadian colleagues,

I am writing this letter as an introduction, and also to give your clients the opportunity to invest in San Francisco real estate. The other day it occurred to me that the Canadian dollar is very strong against the US dollar and that there might be real estate agents with clients who would like to invest in property in the US or have a second home in our beautiful city of San Francisco but don’t know how to get started or where to buy.

As a Realtor with over 33 years of experience in San Francisco real estate, I can tell you that NOW is a great time to buy and can best guide your clients to the right areas of the City. Our market has never been stronger, and with the Fed continuing to lower rates, loans are just going to get better and better.

A lot of areas have been hit by the sub-prime meltdown and foreclosures but not us. In fact, while sales volumes are down for the year (mostly because of low inventory), our average selling price has continued to go up at about 10% a year! Think about the cash on cash return for your clients in these leveraged investments!

We expect as the year rolls on, our economy continue to roar back, and with that comes a stronger housing market and higher home values. Don’t let your clients miss out on the opportunity to take advantage of the strong Canadian dollar, the lowering of interest rates and a strong San Francisco real estate market!

We pay referral fees and will take great care of your clients.  Please check out my website www.sfresidence.com or call me TOLL FREE: 1-866-224-8024.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Sincerely,

Janis Stone

Red Frog owners meet in Minneapolis!

The owners had a meeting last week, and organizer, Chris Hahn, wrote a general overview of the outcome. Apparently many people who had been opposed to moving forward had their minds changed by the open disclosures of the Red Frog principals and were encouraged by the fact that funding may be just around the corner.

Read the article here.

- Mick Orton

Here is an article spawned by a letter I wrote to Sam Taliaferro, a Panama Developer, who runs a blog called the Panama Investor Blog.

The Red Frog Beach project in Bocas Del Toro is an important one for that area as well as Panama. It is an ambitious project built on an island in one of the more difficult areas of the country in which to take on such a project. The challenges range from material acquisition and logistics to labor and financing. As a developer I sympathize with the difficulties these folks have faced. I have visited the property on several occasions and some of the property buyers receive my blogs and write to me regularly. Everyone wants to know, “When will this project get back on its feet and start building again?”

I recently asked the developer to give me an update and he has promised to do so in the near future, but I wanted to share some information with my readers that is from one of the homeowners. Mick Orton loves the project and the area and still looks forward to one day spending a lot of time there. Mick sent me the following information and asked me to share it with you.

Construction at Red Frog Beach on Bastimentos in Bocas del Toro has been silent for over a year. As an investor this made me very nervous that our home on the Caribbean would never be built. After all, we had dreams of keeping our boat at the boat slip, dining in the fine restaurant that they promised would be built, cooling off in our own private pool, waking up to the gentle crashing of waves of the ocean, lounging on the beach and maybe even surfing or waterskiing. Before construction stopped, several homes were finished, and many were under construction. When we got our call to pick our options and colors we thought we were nearing the finish line. Then came word of a strike and pending financing problems. Months went by with no resolution to the problems that plagued Red Frog, and we got concerned.

During that time, not a lot of news was coming from the developers other than the 1 hour monthly conference calls. As a result, several owners started blogs like our Red Frog Blog and Red Frog Beach Forum to keep the buzz going, to stay informed and keep the dream alive. Some chose to use it as a negative forum, but mostly the comments were pleasant and upbeat. The general consensus was (and still is) that we owners wanted this project to succeed, and felt that the developers had the best of intentions to complete it.

Much has changed since we first invested in Red Frog. The government has made several revisions to the tourist visa and property tax exemption laws, not necessarily for the better. (Thanks to the Prima Panama Newsletter and Blog we are keeping a close eye on those changes.) We also found that with the housing and mortgage chaos in the United States, the Panamanian banks and lenders were also affected negatively. And though we were originally told the developers had funding sources for construction on rights of possession land, as money tightened up, these sources disappeared.

The situation has been very complicated with so many rights of possession lots and contracts coming due, it was time for the developers to begin looking for alternatives. Most recently we have seen a major push to move much of the equity from later phases into phase 1 with the introduction of fractional ownerships. Many of the people who were in the project early have seen their financial situations change and were very happy to participate. Money is getting tighter, and fractional ownerships are a great solution for many of the people involved. Another move by the developers to get this project back on track has been to make concessions to owners in order to get around problems with rights of possession land. I feel Red Frog has been exceedingly creative in working with the owners to turn this thing around and get back on course.

Since the beginning I have been bullish on Red Frog. The project will bring much needed money back to the business people of the area and to construction workers as well as their families. I am told the area has been hurt by the work stoppage, and starting construction again will be a boom to the local economy as it was in the past. There is hope that complications will be worked out soon and construction could begin again within a very short time.

Mick Orton – Red Frog Beach lot owner

Previously we were posting portions of our weekly market update on our blog and then pointing people to the entire article on our website. But now that seems silly since our blog IS on our website! So there’s no real reason to double post.

Our home page has changed in format and the current market report may easily be seen here. There is also a link on our home page with a short excerpt of the weekly news.

Today I want to focus on our International opportunities. If you go to www.sfresidence.com/intl.htm you will see a link to our investment in Panama. Though they have been on strike for over a year, they project is about to be started back up and the latest is fractional ownerships!

Here is my article from today’s blog at www.redfrogbeachforum.com (now defunct):

Thanks to many of the owners who have contacted us recently after seeing my posts at redfrogblog.blogspot.com. Before we heard from you, we felt we were all alone out there; torn between sticking with it and wanting to see Red Frog succeed or getting our money out and moving on. We have decided to do the former.

Joe and Dan have been exceptional at explaining their position and our options; they have worked exceedingly hard at helping us find a solution to our unique situation. They were very good at making lemonade out of lemons!

At first we were not thrilled at having our dreams of a beach front villa wiped out. And fractional ownership was the furthest thing from our mind. We wanted to have our own place, decorate it like we wanted and rent it or not rent it out. That may still happen, but not until Phase I is completed. So our next question was, what do we really want?

We are now convinced that fractional is a good alternative for the short term. We will be able to visit to see if we even like living on Bastimentos, or if we really want to build that dream home on the Caribbean!

Plus the host home could be done as early as the end of the year if the project starts back up. That certainly is a lot better than waiting possibly 2-3 more years for titling on our rights of possession lot so we can finance our villa (or worse, having to come up with 100% to build it!). If we don’t like it, there is a good chance we can sell the fractional and get our money out that way.

For those of you naysayers, you probably think I have drunk the Kool-Aid. Those of you who are already onboard, you have probably come to the same conclusions we have and have made or are contemplating making a deal to get this project back on track.

We believe this is the best solution for all of us; to get the project built. Good luck to everyone at the owners’ meeting next month in Minneapolis. We will not be there. We are told the room is FULL! Most of the attendees I have communicated with are very positive about finding solutions. I think it will be a most enjoyable event!

If you have questions or concerns, e-mail me at mick@sfresidence.com.

Mick @ Lot 83