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Where Are the Best Places to Live in France?

Where Are the Best Places to Live in France?

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According to International Living Magazine, there is nowhere better to live in the world than France. Earlier this year the influential publication examined 194 countries on 9 specific criteria such as culture, climate and crime, and France came out on top -- for the fifth year running! For us Britons that's fortunate, because France is on our doorstep and it's therefore an easy country to escape to. . .

. . .and it's a good thing that we can so easily access beautiful France for a better quality of more affordable life! However, a more in-depth study of what it's like to live specifically in France reveals that there is a great deal of difference between the various departments and regions.

So, where are the best places to live in France? The answer is of course 'it depends' -- i.e., it depends what you're looking for from life. France's L'Express magazine has taken it upon itself to examine the whole of France based on a range of criteria that determine quality of life, and it's findings are invaluable if you are thinking of living in France.

Where to Live in France if You're Moving with Children in Tow

Based on where there are the best schools and educational facilities, the best shopping and also employment prospects, L'Express has rated the following department as the top three for families: -

1 - Haute-Garonne in the Midi Pyrenees
2 - Pyrénées-Atlantiques in Aquitaine
3 -- Vendée in Pays de la Loire

Each department scored well on average for the type of criteria families typically place on a destination. . .and so these are recommended spots for you to explore if you're thinking of relocating to France with children in tow.

Where to Live in France if You're Thinking of Retiring

For those aged 50+, schools and employment prospects will be less important of course, whereas health care facilities, where residents are healthiest and live longest, where the quality of the environment and the climate are favourable and where crime is less will be important factors. As a result L'Express rated the following departments as the top three for would-be retirees: -

1 - Hautes-Alpes in Provence Alpes -- Cote D'Azur
2 -- Corrèze in Limousin
3 -- Aveyron in the Midi-Pyrenes

Where is the Best Place in France for Affordable Property?

If you're looking to move to France and the one thing driving your desire is the fact that you can hopefully afford a beautiful home then the following departments should be considered by you: -

1 - Indre in the Centre region
2 - Nièvre in Burgundy
3 - Meuse in Lorraine

Although Creuse, the Correze and the Haute Loire are all also worth a look if you're after an affordable place to live.

Where To Live in France for the Best Weather

When it comes to the weather, we usually think the hotter the better, but the French think it's important to look at climate as a whole when thinking about the best environment in which to live -- as a result it's probably unsurprising that the Mediterranean region came out on top. It offers stunning summer weather as we well know, but at the same time the winters are far less harsh as well, meaning that Var and Bouches-du-Rhône from the Provence Alpes -- Cote D'Azur region took joint first place for their climate.

The Best Place to Live in France for the Good of Your Health

If you're looking to move abroad to escape the stresses of everyday life and you're concerned about your health and accessing the best healthcare on offer across the Channel then the following are L'Express's top 3 destinations for health tourists!

1 -- Paris
2 - Bouches-du-Rhône in the Provence Alpes -- Cote D'Azur region
3 - Gironde in Aquitaine

The Overall Top 20 Places to Live in France

L'Express magazine looked at a whole host of criteria from where the climate is better to where the natural environment has been well preserved, (Lozère, Ariège and then the Pyrénées-Orientales in case you were wondering), and ultimately it placed the 96 departments in one long ordered list. The overall top 20 places to live in France from their detailed analysis are therefore as follows: -

1 - Haute-Garonne
2 - Pyrénées-Atlantiques
3 - Ille-et-Vilaine
4 - Isère
5 - Gironde
6 - Hérault
7 - Maine-et-Loire
8 - Rhône
9 - Vienne
10 - Vendée
11 - Loire-Atlantique
12 - Côte-d'Or
13 - Corrèze
14 - Alpes-Maritimes
15 - Indre-et-Loire
16 - Bas-Rhin
17 - Savoie
18 - Doubs
19 - Haute-Savoie
20 - Puy-de-Dôme

Maybe you have a comment on this article or we can be of assistance in your search?

Thanks for reading!

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Paris is now the biggest real estate investment destination in Europe

Paris is now the biggest real estate investment destination in Europe, having overtaken London in the second half of last year according to new data released by CB Richard Ellis.

In its survey of European capital markets, CBRE reports that investment volumes in Paris hit 7.9 billion Euros in 2H 2011, up from 3.6 billion Euros in the first half of the year. With this Paris pipped London at the post with its 7.8 billion Euros investment volume.

The office sector drove the surge in Paris investment according to the report, with a mixture of single-asset and large portfolio transactions. With turnover up 30.7% in the second half of 2011, Paris now accounts for over 14% of the European real estate investment market according to CBRE.

The report also highlights a recovery in Moscow real estate investment. With 2.6 billion Euros invested in the second half, compared to 1.9 bn in the first half, Moscow overtook Berlin to become the sixth biggest real estate investment market in Europe.

CBRE believes investment in Moscow will continue to grow. 'Domestic investors account for the majority of commercial real estate investment in Russia. Once foreign investors recover their appetite for Russia, we can expect Russia to rise further, not least as it is one of Europe's three megapolises,' said Christopher Peters, CBRE research director for Russia.

The report's market by market analysis shows strong year on year growth in real estate investment for 2011 as a whole in France and Germany, while investment shrank in Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK. In fact, in Ireland only 8 deals were done in 2011 almost every one following a repossession, and in Portugal only 15 deals were done. This shows that while bond investors may have eased up of late, property investors are still shaky when it comes to the sovereign debt crisis.

Overseas Buyers in US: Foreclosure Auctions

By KEN BELSON

Published: January 14, 2012

PHOENIX — To the unknowing, the few dozen people milling around the picnic tables in front of the Maricopa County courthouse here every day could be jurors on break or scofflaws finally coming to pay a ticket. They tug on cigarettes, sip from big cups of coffee and fidget with their cellphones, often speaking in whispers.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Bidders need a $10,000 certified check and quick response times.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Bidders on foreclosed properties in Phoenix work for investors who, increasingly, live in Canada, China and other countries.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Most of the bidders and auctioneers are men in their 20s and 30s.

But instead of waiting to meet a judge, they are preparing to bid on the hundreds of foreclosed properties auctioned each week in one of the country’s more colorful public clearinghouses. During the housing boom, when mortgages were being given out with no money down and prices soared, the auctions were a sleepy sideshow. But in the years since, the auctions have grown into a scruffy economic circus where bargain hunters from around the world have scooped up houses often sold for less than half of the value of the mortgage.

The auctions look more like a low-end poker game than the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The bidders and auctioneers, most of them men in their 20s and 30s, are on a clubby first-name basis, and their banter can border on sophomoric. But their trading serves a critical if somewhat heartless function: to find new buyers for houses so they can be fixed up and sold to more stable owners.

“This is capitalism at its rawest,” said Brad Grannis, a bidder from AZ Property Advisors. “There’s an asset, and people assign a value to it.”

In recent months, the auctions have become more competitive because of an influx of outsiders who are eager for cut-rate houses that they can resell or rent out and because of a decrease in the number of houses available. There were 2,296 trustee sales in Maricopa County last month, 44 percent fewer than in December two years ago during the depths of the market crash, according to The Cromford Report, a real estate newsletter.

Many economists say that the housing market has a long way to go before it returns to health and that the decline in foreclosures is partly because lenders, often under political pressure, are trying to work with distressed borrowers.

But optimists in Phoenix point to the decline as a harbinger of an upturn, albeit a tentative one.

“We went lower than anywhere except Las Vegas, and we got through the foreclosure crisis faster,” said Mike Orr, a researcher at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and the editor of The Cromford Report. “I don’t know if this will be a significant recovery, but even going up a few points is still a recovery.”

The courthouse auctions have a bloodlessness that belies their impact on people’s lives. Every day, in the rain, morning chill or scorching heat, a half-dozen auctioneers set up shop on the picnic tables in front of the courthouse. They flip open their laptops and read off the addresses of the properties for sale, the value of each mortgage, the taxes due and the opening bid, which the seller determines. Homeowners’ names are never mentioned.

The bidders, many wearing jeans, hoodies and the occasional nose ring, work for investors who rarely attend the actual bidding. Increasingly, those investors come from Canada, China and other countries where Arizona property looks like a bargain. Local investors say these newcomers, as well as hedge funds, have driven up prices and made it harder to turn a profit.

The bidders register with each auctioneer and must produce a $10,000 certified check. They consult their spreadsheets on clipboards or iPads, which list the homes for sale. Many wear earpieces connected to cellphones so they can instantly relay the prices during the auction to their bosses, who know the limit of their clients.

“There’s no emotion in the bidding,” said Mary Nicholes, who runs the Home Ownership Center of Arizona, which bids on behalf of investors who want to rent out their homes. “They all have their number.”

The bidding moves quickly, but there are no secret signals and bidders rarely make eye contact. The regulars help one another, and they will also cheer or encourage colleagues as if they were investing their own money. “You got a hole in one!” one bidder yelled to another who had just bought a house with virtually no bidding. Bidding companies are typically paid a flat fee of about $2,500 or 3 percent of the purchase price, with a share of that money going to the bidder.

No rules are posted, but the bidders obey a strict code, the cardinal rule of which is that those who fail to pay their bills can no longer bid. One former bidder earned the nickname Runaway Bride after she won an auction for the wrong house, panicked and fled the scene without paying her $10,000 deposit.

Individual bidders show up, too. Christopher St. John, a longtime broker in Phoenix, recently went to bid on a house that was near another one that he bought and resold last year, making a $16,000 profit. Bidding at the auction started at $119,700 and zoomed past Mr. St. John’s limit of $125,000. The auctioneer, in chinos, a golf shirt and a Diamondbacks baseball cap, eventually sold the house for $158,000.

Mr. St. John thought the house was worth no more than $175,000, and because he would have to pay about $15,000 to fix it and cover any fees and taxes, bidding that high did not make sense to him. But to well-heeled investors, a smaller profit was acceptable, he said.

“It’s amazing how different it is now and how many more people there are,” he said. “It’s a battle to get properties.”

At times, the auctioneers and bidders are confronted with the reality of what they are trading. Some homeowners come to see their houses sold and vent their anger. A few bring video cameras to film the auction, trying to intimidate the bidders. Every so often a homeowner, having walked away from the mortgage, will bid on his own house. In recent weeks, protesters from the Occupy Phoenix movement camped in the park across the street have stopped by to appeal for an end to the auctions.

For some bidders, the intrusion is another reminder of the hardship that they themselves are enduring. This month, Kelly Galles started working as a bidder after a bout with cancer forced her to give up her job teaching preschool. Her husband, who worked in construction until the downturn, is one of the auctioneers. Lured to Arizona from California during good times, they bought a house that is now worth less than what they owe on it.

“It’s a pretty exciting job,” she said. “The downside is these are people’s homes. We’re lucky not to be here ourselves.”

Miami Real Estate Market Embraces Brazilians

By NANCY BETH JACKSON

Published: December 29, 2011

MIAMI — In 2008 the real estate market in this “Gateway to Latin America” was in the dumps, with the hottest deals involving foreclosures. And the future looked as dark as many of the new beachfront luxury condo towers, where scores of buyers had forfeited sizable deposits and walked away from their deals.

“We had 70 years of product inventory out of the ground or ready to be built,” recalled Maurice Veissi, a local Realtor and president of the National Association of Realtors. “About a third who had contracts walked. Another third had to close but never built. It was basic supply and demand. The prices went down and down and down.”

But that was before the Brazilians became the latest wave of Latin Americans to hit Miami. They first flocked to spend holidays on the beach and then to buy vacation condos, sometimes more than one and mostly for cash.

The languishing real estate was “chewed up” in no time, says Mr. Veissi. Now developers are back, starting or restarting ambitious condo projects.

The Brazilians, of course, aren’t the only reason the local real estate market is looking up. South Florida has become what the Miami Herald labeled “the nation’s epicenter” for residential sales to foreigners, including other Latin Americans and Europeans. In Miami, foreigners account for more than 65 percent of all condo and home sales, according to the Miami Association of Realtors.

Brazilian buyers have steadily surpassed other nationalities. In November, Miami Association of Realtors statistics listed Brazilians as the second most active foreigners, at 12 percent of all buyers, sandwiched between Venezuelans (15 percent) and Argentines (11 percent). While observers expect Brazilians to take the lead next year, Brazilian ownership already is reportedly as high as 70 percent at some luxury towers.

“They are taking Miami by storm,” said Edgardo Defortuna, the Argentine-born founder and chief executive of Miami-based Fortune International Realty, which opened a satellite office in São Paulo last year. “More than just buying one apartment, they are also getting their friends and families to buy. When one buys in a project, the rest follow. They want to be around friends and people they know.”

Unlike earlier Latin American buyers, the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians aren’t fleeing political unrest or waiting out an economic downturn. They aren’t parking flight capital or bringing cash in suitcases. Typically, they are upper-middle-class families who want to enjoy their prosperity newly earned in Brazil as professionals and entrepreneurs.

Their country — geographically slightly larger than the continental United States — is on a roll, enjoying robust economic growth and preparing to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016. Despite concerns over a weakening Brazilian real, optimism is high.

“The Brazilians just come to spend money,” said Cristiano Piquet, a 34-year-old Brazilian who moved to Miami in 2001 to race cars. He now heads a real estate company with some 50 agents who market lifestyle as well as luxury condos averaging $750,000 to $1 million to a mostly Brazilian clientele. “Paradise exists and it’s Miami. Everything is half the price and everything works,” he said.

Plus, he added, Miami is clean, organized and, most of all, safe to flaunt signs of affluence like Rolex watches or Aston Martin convertibles without fear of street crime. One local vanity license plate, he said, telegraphs in Portuguese: “Here I can.”

Buyers come from Brazil’s wealthy states, like Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul, as well as the major cities of Rio and São Paulo. And access is easy, with many nonstop flights (of about nine hours) offered to Miami from airports throughout the country.

Once in Miami, Brazilians favor high-end, waterfront, family-sized condos. And while they usually only pay short visits two or three times of year, they do not rent out the properties between trips, Mr. Piquet said, explaining, “Brazilians don’t want anyone else sleeping in their beds.”

Brazilians have bought heavily in top-end offerings like the 1,800-unit Icon Brickell on Biscayne Bay. That complex and several other upscale projects feature design packages by the Brazilian furniture manufacturer Artefacto, which maintains showrooms in two high-end malls here.

Miami has a history of boom and bust and boom again. No project tells the story better than the Icon Brickell, which broke ground in 2006 and had many units priced at more than $1 million. But only a handful were ready for closing two years ago when banks took over two of the project’s three towers.

In September, after aggressive international marketing by Fortune Realty, it was touted as the top-selling real estate project in Florida. By November, the last developer units were sold, 18 months ahead of the new marking schedule, with sales dominated by Latin Americans.

At Brickellhouse, Miami’s first new condo tower in recent years, 100 of the 374 units priced from $200,000 to $1.4 million sold in less than 60 days, with almost all the buyers coming from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. (Unlike most U.S. developers, Harvey Hernandez, the project’s Venezuelan-born developer, is requiring buyers to put down 90 percent of the purchase price before construction is completed, a financial model that is familiar to most Latin buyers.)

Steven Minor, an associate at VR Business Brokers of Coral Gables, Florida, and coordinator at the Web site negociosenflorida.com, said many of his Venezuelan clients buy homes in upscale neighborhoods but also invest in small businesses or a portfolio of moderately priced condos to provide income and to meet U.S. visa requirements as investors.

In an effort to stimulate the U.S. housing market, a bipartisan proposal has been introduced in the U.S. Senate that, under certain circumstances, would award three-year residential visas to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in residential real estate. “If that happened, the housing problem in Florida would be solved,” Mr. Piquet declared. “We could expect sales of 10 times more.”

Other changes also may be ahead for the Miami market. Florida lawmakers are scheduled to debate “destination resort” legislation that would allow casino gambling at mega-complexes like the $4 billion Resorts World Miami, a Genting Group of Malaysia project planned on 30 acres, or 12 hectares, along Biscayne Bay. Designed for Asian, European and Latin American visitors, it is to include 1,000 condo units.

Hong Kong-based Swire Properties, active in Miami since the 1970s when it began developing the high-end condo towers on Brickell Key, recently relaunched Brickell CitiCentre, a project that had been canceled in 2008. Already being compared to Swire’s Pacific Place in Hong Kong, the $700-million shopping/multiuse development is now the largest planned development in the area and includes a condo component.

Can Asian residential buyers be far behind the developers, local real estate agents have begun to ask. While the numbers of Asian buyers are still small, Florida’s official tourism marketing organization has declared China “a region of interest,” noting that visitors from the mainland and Hong Kong increased 59 percent between 2009 and 2010.

Buyers searching for unique properties in France

Buyers searching for unique properties in France

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

 

Whilst the boom and bust of the European property market has been significantly contained in France, there's no doubt that the aftermath of the credit crunch has seen holiday home buyers on the market become significantly more discerning with their requirements for a property. With an increasing number of seemingly identical new builds popping up in prominent tourist areas such as Bourgogne and Provence, those searching for a second home are being increasingly drawn towards older, more traditional French homes, which represent a unique selling point among the scores of holiday lettings on the market in the summer season.

According to an investigation by the Guardian, agents are reporting an increase in searches for older farmhouses and cottages, as opposed to purpose-built complexes of holiday apartments, or gites. "In the area around Cognac I've seen a move away from the seemingly obligatory gite complex", Phillipe Gordon of the locally-based, www.bourgognemaisons.com told the newspaper. "Most of my searches are now either for family homes in good condition, with views over the vineyards, priced between €250,000 and €400,000, or for townhouses with a small garden or courtyard between €200,000 and €300,000."

There are bargains to be had with these old-style chateaus too, particularly at the high end of the market, where many investors who overextended themselves during the boom have relinquished their properties to the banks, who are now looking to sell at a price that will simply cover the debt owed. "Lots of people have inherited a substantial amount of debt and banks have divisions dedicated to getting that off their books", Anne Lyse Geneix of www.france-propriete-recherche.com told the Telegraph. "They are not interested in attempting to make money. They just want to cover any outstanding debt, cross it off their list and move on to the next."

Gordon told the newspaper he had several villas currently on his books that fit this criteria, including one that, despite being listed at a value of £7 million, he said would go for £4.2 million. "That's the debt and all the bank is interested in fulfilling", he said.

Interested in property in France?
Browse our listings of apartments, houses and other property for sale in France here:

www.france-propriete-recherche.com

 

Paris Home Prices Surge as City Shrugs off Financial Crisis

March 15, 2011, 2:57 AM EDT

By Simon Packard

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Paris property broker Kerstin Bachmann warned clients two years ago that the global financial crisis would trigger a slump in home prices. Last year, they rose at the fastest pace since at least 1991.

Residential values increased by almost 18 percent in 2010 after a 4 percent decline a year earlier, according to Paris Chamber of Notaries data based on prices per square meter. By the same measure, London had a 1 percent increase.

“All that happened was a small dip” after the financial crisis hit, said Bachmann, a partner at Paris Property Group, which handled 25 deals last year worth 40 million euros ($55 million). “Paris proved itself even more as a safe and sustainable investment option.”

French investors are putting more money into Paris real estate, shunning stock and bond markets, at a time when fewer owners are selling properties and insufficient homes are being built to meet demand. Transactions last year were 9 percent below the average for the past decade, Chamber of Notaries research shows. Prices in the city are rising at their fastest rate relative to disposable incomes since World War I, according to data compiled by government economist Jacques Friggit.

Real estate values in Paris, France’s administrative, financial and political center, have become disconnected from the rest of France. That mirrors London’s premium over the rest of the U.K. and New York’s stronger performance than the U.S. as a whole.

Paris property prices have risen 40 percent since 2005, while values across France are little changed in the same period, according to the national residential real estate brokers’ lobby, FNAIM.

‘World of Difference’

“There’s a world of difference between Paris and the rest of France,” said Roger Abecassis, president of the Consultants Immobilier Group, a chain of 10 brokerages covering the more affluent western half of Paris. “It’s a myth that overseas buyers are driving the market. It’s a French market.”

Construction companies broke ground on just 2,785 new homes in Paris’s 20 districts, or arrondissements, last year and new- home sales totaled only 510 in a city with a population of 2.23 million. That contrasts with the 39,255 of housing starts in the surrounding Ile-de-France region with 11.7 million people.

Transactions fell more sharply in Paris’s most expensive neighborhoods, where wealthy foreigners compete for space in a market dominated by French buyers. The number of properties for sale at Consultants Immobilier fell to 320 from about 700 two years ago, according to Abecassis.

“I’m working with half the inventory, but my revenue has doubled,” he said in an interview at his office in Passy, a neighborhood in the 16th arrondissement.

Trading Up

Most purchases are by existing owners looking to trade up or investors purchasing a rental property, said Sebastien Kuperfis, a director of his family’s Junot Investissements brokerage chain.

“We have lots of investors buying at ridiculously low income yields, but people want security,” he said. “We have reached prices that are so high that there are no first-time buyers.”

The biggest gains were in the “Triangle d’Or” neighborhood in the 8th arrondissement, which lies south of Avenue des Champs-Elysees. Prices advanced 38 percent and have doubled in five years, according to the notaries’ chamber.

The most expensive arrondissement is the 6th on the Left Bank of the River Seine, where the average is 14,105 euros a square meter ($1,829 a square foot), according to Databiens, which compiles its estimates from sales reported by brokers.

Top End

Homes in the district, which incorporates the Luxembourg Gardens, cost more than twice as much as in the 19th arrondissement in the northeast corner of the city, it said.

“The better the location, the less stock there is,” said Laurent Lakatos, the head of Databiens.

The most expensive Paris properties fetch 30,000 euros a square meter, according to Philippe Menager, co-founder of the luxury property brokerage of the same name. He and his associate Nicolas Hug sold two apartments overlooking the River Seine near the Musee d’Orsay for 50,000 euros a square meter and another near the Bois de Boulogne for a similar price, he said.

French “myopia” in choosing property over stocks and bonds is behind the increase, according to government economist Friggit.

“What sticks in their minds is the poor performance of the stock markets over the past 10 years, when there were two crashes, and they expect it to happen again,” Friggit said.

Record-low interest rates and the increased willingness of banks to grant longer-term loans have made purchasing a home more affordable, contributing to the price increases, he said.

Retreat Predicted

Friggit said home prices across the country will likely decline in the next five to eight years as they return to their values relative to incomes. In Paris, that happened in the 1990s after prices surged in the late 1980s, he said.

Paris Chamber of Notaries data show it took almost 11 years for average prices to return to the levels reached in the first quarter of 1991.

A lack of public information on prices is also driving the surge in values, according to Lakatos at Databiens.

Property title deeds aren’t public documents and data compiled by notaries, who handle the legal paperwork in all real estate transactions in France, are as much as six months out of date and distorted by small probate sales of undesirable properties, he said.

France lacks a multiple listing service to provide an accurate view of the market, said Bachmann at Paris Property Group.

Avoiding Brokers

More owners advertise properties themselves to avoid paying brokers the average 5 percent sales commission and profit more from the surge in prices. About half of sales don’t involve a broker, compared with about 30 percent two years ago, she said.

This results in price swings, a significant number of sales falling through and sometimes litigation, she said, because individual owners lack the overview of the market and aren’t bound by the legal constraints that apply to brokers.

“It’s the Wild West, where there are no rules,” she said, referring to sales that don’t involve a broker with a professional licence.

The high prices and limited supply are forcing less affluent buyers to look for properties in lower-cost neighborhoods in the northeast of the city or the inner suburbs, pushing up average values across the city, according to the Chamber of Paris Notaries.

“I like to think that Paris’s uniqueness and the fact that the French have healthy finances will support the market,” said Kuperfis at Junot Investissements. “Naturally I’m getting a bit worried,” about the price increases “because trees can’t keep growing to the sky.”

--Editors: Ross Larsen, Andrew Blackman.

Dollar Higher as traders return to Europe

The dollar continued its recent run of good form yesterday pushing GBPUSD and EURUSD throughout the session. The renewed dollar strength is a simple byproduct of market uncertainty of how much quantitative easing the Fed will go for next Wednesday. Some analysts have suggested a straight injection of $500bn, while some are suggesting $100bn in monthly installments for 6 or so months; either way there is uncertainty.

We have also seen a fair bit of strong data from the US in the past few days with yesterday's releases carrying this on. Durable goods orders buoyed the markets as they grew by 3.3% although ex-transport they declined by 0.8%. New home sales were also good although any improvement from the shocking numbers we saw from the US housing market over the summer is a bonus.

Some news that has swooped back on to traders' radars is that of periphery Europe (the PIGS) and their budgetary issues. News from Portugal yesterday was that budget negotiations between the 2 main parties had fallen over due to disagreements over tax increases while Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said reforms must carry on and that voters should vote responsibly in the upcoming local elections so the country can deal with its problems.

These problems combined with comments from the head of the Greek central bank that Greece is still a long way from economic reform and poor Belgian growth numbers caused the euro to weaken against the dollar and sterling for the second day in a row.

GBP has fallen this morning however after house prices from Nationwide showed that buyers are still staying away from the market. The average cost of a house fell by 0.7% with declines expected through the end of the year as austerity measures cause UK consumers to tighten their belts. GBPEUR is still in the 1.14s at the moment and a close above 1.15 should be enough to clear out this short-term downtrend we find ourselves in.

The data calendar is very quiet today with only US jobless claims at 1.30 to worry about. They are expected to show a slight increase from last week’s figure of 452k with a rise to 455k anticipated.

Latest Exchange Rates At Time Of Writing

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Short Sales Resisted as Foreclosures Are Revived

By MICHAEL POWELL

 

Published: October 24, 2010

PHOENIX — Bank of America and GMAC are firing up their formidable foreclosure machines again today, after a brief pause.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

GMAC declined a short sale for Lydia Sweetland's home.

But hard-pressed homeowners like Lydia Sweetland are asking why lenders often balk at a less disruptive solution: short sales, which allow owners to sell deeply devalued homes for less than what remains on their mortgage.

Ms. Sweetland, 47, tried such a sale this summer out of desperation. She had lost her high-paying job and drained her once-flush retirement savings, and her bank, GMAC, wouldn’t modify her mortgage. After seven months of being unable to pay her mortgage, she decided that a short sale would give her more time to move out of her Phoenix home and damage her credit rating less than a foreclosure.

She owes $206,000 and found a buyer who would pay $200,000. Last Friday, GMAC rejected that offer and said it would foreclose in seven days, even though, according to Ms. Sweetland’s broker, the bank estimates it will make $19,000 less on a foreclosure than on a short sale.

“I guess I could salute and say, ‘O.K., I’m walking, here’s the keys,’ ” says Ms. Sweetland, as she sits in a plastic Adirondack chair on her patio. “But I need a little time, and I don’t want to just leave the house vacant. I loved this neighborhood.”

GMAC declined to be interviewed about Ms. Sweetland’s case.

The halt in most foreclosures the last few weeks gave a hint of hope to homeowners like Ms. Sweetland, who found breathing room to pursue alternatives. Consumer advocates took the view that this might pressure banks to offer mortgage modifications on better terms and perhaps drive interest in short sales, which are rising sharply in many corners of the nation.

But some major lenders took a quick inventory of their foreclosure practices and insisted their processes were sound. They now seem intent on resuming foreclosures. And that could have a profound effect on many homeowners.

In Arizona, thousands of homeowners have turned to short sales to avoid foreclosures, and many end up running a daunting procedural gantlet. Several of the largest lenders have set up complicated and balky application systems.

Concerns about fraud are one of the reasons lenders are so careful about short sales. Sometimes well-off homeowners want to portray their finances as dire and cut their losses on a property. In other instances, distressed homeowners try to make a short sale to a relative, who would then sell it back to them (a practice that is illegal). A recent industry report estimates that short sale fraud occurs in at least 2 percent of sales and costs banks about $300 million annually.

Short sales are also hindered when homeowners fail to forward the proper papers, have tax liens or cannot find a buyer.

Because of such concerns, homeowners often are instructed that they must be delinquent and they must apply for a modification first, even if chances of approval are slim. The aversion to short sales also leads banks to take many months to process applications, and some lenders set unrealistically high sales prices — known as broker price opinions — and hire workers who say they are poorly trained.

As a result, quite a few homeowners seeking short sales — banks will not provide precise numbers — topple into foreclosure, sometimes, critics say, for reasons that are hard to understand. Ms. Sweetland and her broker say they are confounded by her foreclosure, because in Arizona’s depressed real estate market, foreclosed homes often sit vacant for many months before banks are able to resell them.

“Banks are historically reluctant to do short sales, fearing that somehow the homeowner is getting an advantage on them,” said Diane E. Thompson, of counsel to the National Consumer Law Center. “There’s this irrational belief that if you foreclose and hold on to the property for six months, somehow prices will rebound.”

Homeowners, advocates and realty agents offer particularly pointed criticism of Bank of America, the nation’s largest servicer of mortgages, and a recipient of billions of dollars in federal bailout aid. Its holdings account for 31 percent of the pending foreclosures in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and Scottsdale, according to an analysis for The Arizona Republic.

The bank instructs real estate agents to use its computer program to evaluate short sales. But in three cases observed by The New York Times in collaboration with two real estate agents, the bank’s system repeatedly asked for and lost the same information and generated inaccurate responses.

In half a dozen more cases examined by The New York Times, Bank of America rejected short sale offers, foreclosed and auctioned off houses at lower prices.

“When I hear that a client’s mortgage is held by Bank of America, I just sigh. Our chances of getting an approval for them just went from 90 percent to 50-50,” said Benjamin Toma, who has a family-run real estate agency in Phoenix.

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• Foreclosures Had Errors, Bank Finds (October 25, 2010)

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Bank of America officials also declined interview requests. A Bank of America spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the bank had processed 61,000 short sales nationwide this year; she declined to provide numbers for Arizona or to discuss criticisms of the company’s processing.

Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance company with federal backing, gives cash incentives to encourage servicers, who are affiliated with banks and who oversee great bundles of delinquent mortgages, to approve short sales.

But less obvious financial incentives can push toward a foreclosure rather than a short sale. Servicers can reap high fees from foreclosures. And lenders can try to collect on private mortgage insurance.

Some advocates and real estate agents also point to an April 2009 regulatory change in an obscure federal accounting law. The change, in effect, allowed banks to foreclose on a home without having to write down a loss until that home was sold. By contrast, if a bank agrees to a short sale, it must mark the loss immediately.

Short sales, to be sure, are no free ride for homeowners. They take a hit to their credit ratings, although for three to five years rather than seven after a foreclosure. An owner seeking a short sale must satisfy a laundry list of conditions, including making a detailed disclosure of income, tax and credit liens. And owners must prove that they have no connection to the buyer.

Still, bank decision-making, at least from a homeowner’s perspective, often appears arbitrary. That is certainly the view of Nicholas Yannuzzi, who after 30 years in Arizona still talks with a Philadelphia rasp. Mr. Yannuzzi has owned five houses over time, without any financial problems. When his wife was diagnosed with bone cancer, he put 20 percent down and bought a ranch house in North Scottsdale so that she would not have to climb stairs.

In the last few years, his wife died, he lost his job and he used his retirement fund to pay his mortgage for five months. His bank, Wells Fargo, denied his mortgage modification request and then his request for a short sale.

The bank officer told him that Fannie Mae, which held the mortgage, would not take a discount. At the end of last week, he was waiting to be locked out of his home.

“I’m a proud man. I’ve worked since I was 20 years old,” he said. “But I’ve run out of my 79 weeks of unemployment, so that’s it.”

He shrugged. “I try to keep in the frame of mind that a lot of people have it worse than me.”

Back in Phoenix, Ms. Sweetland’s real estate agent, Sherry Rampy, appeared to receive good news last week. GMAC re-examined her client’s application and suggested it might be approved.

But the bank attached a condition: Ms. Sweetland must come up with $2,000 in closing costs or pay $100 a month for 50 months to the bank. Ms. Sweetland, however, is flat broke.

A late afternoon desert sun angles across her Pasadena neighborhood.

“After this, I’ll never buy again,” Ms. Sweetland says. “This is not the American dream. This is not my American dream.”

Real Estate Bargain Hunter?

By DEVIN LEONARD

 

John Van Beekum for The New York Times

Barry Sternlicht, creator of Starwood Hotels, bought up condo properties from Miami to Las Vegas. Some, like Paramount Bay in Miami, still sit empty.

Multimedia

 Weekend Business: Tim O’Brien and Devin Leonard on Barry Sternlicht’s buying spree.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts

A member of Starwood’s hotel family: the St. Regis.

THE Paramount Bay condominium is a 47-story steel-and-glass cadaver. Conceived at the height of the real estate boom as another ultraluxury tower in a city that would soon be choking on them, it looms unfinished and unoccupied on Biscayne Bay.

The lobby is like a mortuary. There are no chandeliers on the three-story ceiling, no paintings on the walls. And there is nobody at the front desk to greet visitors. The only sound is the eerie gurgle of a 40-foot waterfall.

None of this deters Barry Sternlicht, the real estate investor who owns the building. “The bones,” he says, gesturing around the room. “The bones are extraordinary!”

Mr. Sternlicht plans to transform Paramount Bay into a haven for wealthy buyers who will one day want to live here. But he concedes that the building’s entrance needs work. “This looks like an abandoned property,” he says. “We have to make it look like it’s alive.”

The pool area lacks something, too. “It needs a concept,” he says, wrinkling his brow. He’s not yet sure what that will be. But he knows this much: The bamboo trees adorning the entrance have to go. “We should put some wisteria or some vines over there,” he says.

Then it’s up to one of the top floors to admire the sweeping views from an empty unit. “Look at this,” he says, pointing out the landmarks in the distance: South Beach, Key Biscayne and the downtown Miami skyline. “Someone is going to want to live here — someday.”

Perhaps such brio is a prerequisite for an investor wading into the worst real estate wipeout in generations. Indeed, Mr. Sternlicht, 49, has been one of the downturn’s busiest buyers. In the last year and a half, his private equity firm, Starwood Capital, has raised more than $3 billion. He has bought land in Florida and ski lodges in Colorado. He created a real estate finance company, Starwood Property Trust, which he took public last August in a successful initial public offering. And on Friday he ended an aggressive but unsuccessful run at Extended Stay Hotels, which was being auctioned off in bankruptcy court.

But his highest-profile deal has been the acquisition of the $4.5 billion real estate loan portfolio of Corus Bankshares, the nation’s largest condominium construction lender until it failed last September because it had financed too many projects like Paramount Bay. The following month, Mr. Sternlicht and a group of investors — including TPG Capital, WLR LeFrak and Perry Capital — won the loans in an auction run by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, paying $554 million for 40 percent of the package, valuing the debt at 60 cents on the dollar. The F.D.I.C. holds the remaining 60 percent.

Mr. Sternlicht hopes to foreclose on many of Corus’s errant borrowers, restyle their buildings and sell units for a significant profit once the real estate market recovers. He says he and his investors can afford to wait until then because the F.D.I.C. has provided them with $1.4 billion in zero-coupon financing and an additional $1 billion in low-cost loans that can be used to complete unfinished projects.

There’s an upside for the F.D.I.C. too, Mr. Sternlicht says: it will recover the full value of the Corus portfolio by working with him. “They are going to make a couple of billion,” he says. “If they sold it outright, they would have lost money.”

If all goes as planned, Mr. Sternlicht says, he and his investors are also positioned to do rather well themselves.

SOME are skeptical of Mr. Sternlicht’s projections. While real estate prices are no longer in free fall, a recovery still looks far away. Condo prices have plummeted since the 2006 peak, according to the National Association of Realtors — 43 percent in Miami and 55 percent in Las Vegas. In Los Angeles, they are off by 44 percent from their high three years ago.

Then there’s that $554 million price that the Sternlicht group ponied up to snare its portion of the Corus portfolio — it was 20 percent higher than its two closest competitors. “Everybody in the industry thinks Sternlicht overpaid,” says Peter Zalewski, founder of Condo Vultures, a real estate brokerage and consulting firm in Bal Harbour, Fla.

Nothing bothers Mr. Sternlicht more than the suggestion that he overpaid. “If I had to bid for it again, I’d pay more today,” he says.

But Linus Wilson, a finance professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, who has studied the F.D.I.C.’s real estate sales, says he thinks the price Mr. Sternlicht paid for Corus will hobble his returns. Mr. Wilson points out that 59 percent of the loans on Corus’s books were no longer performing before the bank failed in September, meaning that they were generating virtually no income. Corus described another $558 million in the portfolio as “problem loans” that were near default.

Mr. Wilson argues that if Mr. Sternlicht doesn’t sell condos right away, he may have trouble making his first loan payment of $150 million that comes due in October 2011. “It is far from guaranteed that he and his investors will make money on this transaction,” Mr. Wilson says.

And before Mr. Sternlicht can even change the lobby furniture and the landscaping at many of these Corus-financed projects, his investor group has to prevail in a slew of foreclosure proceedings against developers who have defaulted on their loans.

Some of these exhausted borrowers are simply handing over the keys peacefully. Others are fighting back and asking a politically charged question: Why is the federal government offering low-interest financing to Mr. Sternlicht and his private equity partners when it could be helping struggling condo builders finish their projects, which are keeping hundreds of people employed?

John Van Beekum for The New York Times

Barry Sternlicht in a condo at the unfinished Paramount Bay. “Someone is going to want to live here — someday,” he says.

Multimedia

Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg News

W New York — Times Square is part of Starwood’s hotel family.

Sonny Astani, developer of one such project, the Concerto project in Los Angeles, says the government should support him rather than backing Mr. Sternlicht.

“I think Sternlicht is going to wind up flipping all this stuff in a year,” Mr. Astani predicts. “There are going to be huge lawsuits and bad publicity. His investors are going to get sick of it.”

YOU might not expect to find Barry Sternlicht selling condos in Miami in a recession. He is best known for creating Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, a major hotelier that he built into a public company with $6 billion in annual revenue and brand names like Sheraton and Westin. He conjured up the Westin’s signature Heavenly Bed and the W Hotel chain, which introduced hip, boutique inns to the masses.

In the last real estate recession, in the early 1990s, Mr. Sternlicht laid the groundwork for his hotel empire by snapping up distressed properties. Now Mr. Sternlicht, who left Starwood Hotels in 2005 after a dispute with the board of directors, is making a similar play with distressed condos in overbuilt cities like Miami, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Tanned, fit and sitting on the couch of his office in Greenwich, Conn., he apologizes for his head cold and then starts a spirited defense of the Corus deal. The way he sees it, he and his partners are going to be the dominant players in all the cities where Corus poured its money.

“We are going to be like the Saudis in all these markets,” he says. “We have the lowest cost of production and all the oil. There’s nothing else new under construction. In three years, when all the debris, all the clutter is done, we’ll be the guys. We will have price control.”

The key, he says, is the cheap F.D.I.C. financing. “That’s the beauty of this investment,” he says. “I can afford to wait. If I had high-ticker, 10 percent financing, which would probably be the market rate, I would have to dump stuff. The interest payments would be killing me.”

Mr. Sternlicht boasts about some properties on which his group holds the notes — like Terranea, a $475 million resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. “It’s got the second-largest ballroom in Southern California,” he says. “It’s right on the water. It took 12 years to get the zoning.”

Other projects will need a bit of work. One of them, called One Las Vegas, is a condo project with five towers — only two of which have been completed — on the outskirts of the city. “It’s a mess,” says Norman Radow, founder of Radco Development Solutions, an expert on distressed real estate. “It’s across the street from a trailer park. I guess it has views, but they are of the desert.”

Mr. Sternlicht is more charitable about the property in Las Vegas. “I think we are going to convert that one to rentals,” he says. “The units are pretty nice. And the views are great.”

In the meantime, he adds, the Corus portfolio had already generated $400 million in cash. Therefore, he says, nobody should worry about his group’s ability to cover its debt payments.

Mr. Sternlicht says he is simply doing today what he did during the last real estate recession: amassing inexpensive real estate and finding ways to make it more desirable. “Barry likes to buy real estate by the pound and then find the value in it,” says Robert Wennett, a Miami Beach developer who worked with him in the 1990s.

A Harvard Business School graduate, Mr. Sternlicht spent the 1980s learning his trade at JMB Realty in Chicago, a leading deal maker at the time. He was let go after the real estate market collapsed in 1989. So he ventured out on his own, raising $20 million from the wealthy Ziff and Burden families of New York and buying loans from the Resolution Trust Corporation, which the federal government had created to mop up the real estate mess left from the savings-and-loan debacle.

He journeyed to auctions and bid against guys in pickup trucks to buy the notes on apartment complexes at rock-bottom prices. He says one complex came with a llama farm and turned out to be a pretty good investment. The llama farmer, Mr. Sternlicht says, flew to Chicago to pay off a $1 million loan before Mr. Sternlicht could foreclose on it.

He also invested in hotels. In 1994, he bought the discounted debt on a publicly traded hotel company, Hotel Investors Trust, and used it to buy Westin Hotels. Then, in 1996, Mr. Sternlicht surprised Wall Street when he outmaneuvered the Hilton Hotel chain and bought ITT Sheraton for $14 billion.

Christina House for Astani Enterprises

The Concerto condos in Los Angeles were financed by Corus Bankshares.

“He was absolutely a minnow compared to Hilton,” says Thomas Flexner, Citigroup’s global head of real estate, who advised Mr. Sternlicht on this deal and many others.

The new hotel king became known for his obsession with details. He says that the “one time” he totally lost it was when he arrived at the W Hotel on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and discovered that the foliage at the front door was dead. “I actually went over to the Smith & Hawken store and bought furniture and plants for them,” he says. “I didn’t want to wait 18 months.”

“Barry doesn’t delegate,” Mr. Flexner says.

Mr. Sternlicht’s tenure as the hotel company’s C.E.O. would end badly. His friends say he wanted to relinquish his managerial duties and do deals. He recruited his successor, Steven Heyer, only to become disillusioned with him. The board didn’t agree. So Mr. Sternlicht resigned in 2005. (Mr. Heyer left two years later.)

Mr. Sternlicht returned to Starwood Capital, his original investment vehicle, to do deals. But his timing couldn’t have been worse. He raised a lot of money but couldn’t seem to find his way. He tried to start an eco-friendly hotel chain called the 1, but nothing has come of that venture.

He also chased hotels and office buildings, but he says he couldn’t bring himself to be the high bidder paying top dollar in such a frothy market. “I’m a distressed-real-estate guy,” he explains. “I could make no sense of what was going on.”

MR. STERNLICHT says he was relieved when the real estate bubble burst. He had a ready stockpile of cash and a target in mind: Corus.

Once a plodding Chicago lender, Corus went into overdrive after Robert J. Glickman became its chief executive in 1984. It offered certificates of deposit with above-market interest rates to buyers on the Internet and lent the money that gushed in to developers. By 2006, Corus was the nation’s foremost condo construction lender, says Matthew Anderson, a managing director of Foresight Analytics, a real estate consulting firm.

When the real estate market fell apart, busted loans piled up on the bank’s books. “If you were in the real estate business, you know that this bank was going to fail,” Mr. Sternlicht says. “It was just running out of time.” (Mr. Glickman declined to be interviewed.)

In March 2009, Mr. Sternlicht started forming a plan to buy the bank. Six months later, the government shut Corus and announced that it would sell its real estate loans in an auction, keeping a large part of the equity and offering potential buyers cheap financing.

“The reason why we do it is to allow the F.D.I.C. to capture the asset management efficiencies and expertise that a sophisticated player in the market can bring to the table,” says James Wigand, a senior official with the regulator. “It also allows us to participate in the recovery.”

Analysts say that structuring the deal that way was a smart move for the F.D.I.C. “Over all, I’d say it was a home run for Sheila Bair,” says Chris Whalen, editor of Institutional Risk Analyst, referring to the F.D.I.C. chairwoman. “You have to remember how bad the markets were back then. She was trying to jump-start the resolution process.”

And yet even now people continue to say Mr. Sternlicht overpaid. Dean S. Adler, the chief executive of Lubert-Adler Partners, one of the bidders who lost out in the Corus auction, calls his competitor a “brilliant” investor. But he says that the number that Mr. Sternlicht and his partners paid suggests that they either have a much more optimistic view about when the real estate market will recover or are willing to accept a lower return on the deal.

That sort of talk rankles Mr. Sternlicht. He says Mr. Alder and his co-bidder, Related Companies, blew it by mispricing their offers. Mr. Sternlicht says he got a copy of their due diligence for the Corus auction and found that they anticipated spending hundreds of million of dollars to fix construction defects. He adds that he and his investors encountered none of these woes.

Mr. Adler doesn’t deny that he and Related expected problems. “That’s why we didn’t bid as much,” he says. Related declined to comment.

MR. STERNLICHT also says he is having fewer problems than he expected with foreclosures. Rather than litigate, some developers with projects in default are handing over buildings and have agreed to stick around and help the new owners manage them and sell condos. One of them is Key International, which developed the Mint condominiums in Miami with Corus money.

“It was a close call,” the Key vice president Inigo Ardid says wearily. “I just decided it would be better to do a workout than have a fight and waste a lot of energy.”

Others are proving more difficult. The Sternlicht group tried to foreclose on the unfinished Trump Fort Lauderdale Hotel and Condominium in Fort Lauderdale and ended up in a messy legal battle with the project’s development group, SB Hotel Associates, as well as condo buyers who have sued to get their deposits back.

Then there are the developers who see a larger political issue in Mr. Sternlicht’s partnership with the F.D.I.C. Alessandro Feretti and Piero Salussolia are fighting to keep the Sternlicht group from foreclosing on Artecity, their condo development in South Beach.

Their lawyer, Thomas R. Lehman, links the Corus deal to the federal government’s unpopular bank bailout. “It’s all part of the government’s program of picking the haves and the have-nots,” he says. “Companies like Goldman Sachs and Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood are the haves. Developers like Alessandro and Piero are the have-nots.”

Mr. Sternlicht says that nothing could be further from the truth. “We are trying to protect the government’s money,” he says. “We are not acting in an evil, capricious manner.”

Besides, he would rather talk about his plans to fix his new properties. To that end, he brandishes a picture of Lakefront Wharf, a fortress-like resort in Panama City, Fla., that looks as if it were built in the late 1960s in a former Soviet republic.

Mr. Sternlicht acknowledges that Laketown Wharf isn’t exactly a W Hotel — yet.

“This one needs a little aesthetic charm,” he sighs. “The inside is even worse.”

From a Mysterious Mansion to a Ralph Lauren Store

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

 

Published: October 7, 2010

Office for Metropolitan History

The Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo house, as it looked in 1899. By most accounts, Mrs. Waldo never lived there.

Gertrude Rhinelander was born about 1837 into a family that had lived in New York since the 17th century, and in 1876 she married Francis Waldo, a stockbroker who had been ruined in the Panic of 1873. Her lifestyle, however, was never less than genteel; at her death in 1914, The New York Sun said she had inherited $2 million.

Mr. Waldo died in 1878, and in 1882 Mrs. Waldo bought the southeast corner of 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, which despite its horsecar line was dotted with the mansions of those who eschewed the show of Fifth. The Real Estate Record and Guide reported that Mrs. Waldo was going to erect a mansion “quite unique in design.” She did not go ahead, but five years later bought the inside lot on the side street.

Mrs. Waldo still did not build, and lived with her sister, Laura, in a row house across 72nd from the site. According to The Oswego Daily Palladium in 1889, Mrs. Waldo was “a very pretty woman,” and by some accounts she was keeping company with Charles Schieffelin, a lawyer.

But in 1889 she sued him for stealing $12,000 she had given him to invest. Mr. Schieffelin, a Union Club member separated from his wife, counterclaimed that he and Mrs. Waldo were to be married, and that he had invested the money as directed. She protested that marrying a divorced man would have been “too dreadful” to contemplate. The disposition of the case is not clear.

It was not until 1894 that Mrs. Waldo, then living at the old Hotel Savoy, began to build an impressive limestone mansion, along with a smaller house on the inside lot. In the French Renaissance style, it would have fit in just fine with those on Fifth. In any event, it had elegant company on Madison Avenue, which north of 59th attracted perhaps a dozen mansions. Consuelo Vanderbilt was living in one on the southwest corner of 72nd when she married the Duke of Marlborough in 1895.

Kimball & Thompson received design credit in architectural periodicals, but a photograph of the mansion published at or near the end of construction included the notation that it was designed by Alexander Mackintosh, an obscure local practitioner. With delicate, lacy Loire Valley trim, it has so many windows, it looks as if somebody had taken a shotgun to it. There was said to be a top-floor ballroom and 2,000 electric lights, but only two bedrooms for servants. The New York Times opined that such a house would require a staff of at least a dozen.

Mrs. Waldo’s overwrought dwelling was completed by 1898. One directory lists her as residing there, but that is probably an error. All other period sources say she remained in her sister’s much more modest row house across the street, and never moved in.

At her death in 1914, The New York Sun described Mrs. Waldo as “of forceful manner and some unusual views” on art, dress and society, and said that she had vowed to leave the United States several times. Mrs. Waldo was often in court, and not just with Mr. Schieffelin. In 1901 a subcontractor on the house filed a claim against her for $2,600. In 1909, she began an extensive legal battle with a servant, Mary Madden, who complained she was owed $5; there were suits and cross-suits for $250, $15,000 and a claim of false arrest.

Mrs. Waldo resigned from a club in indignation in 1909 when another member criticized her dress. And in 1912 The Sun reported that she was sued for illegally transferring assets to her sister to avoid payment of a debt. The outcome of most of these complaints is hazy.

At the same time, Mrs. Waldo personally collected rents in her twin apartment buildings, the Kaiser and the Rhine, at Second Avenue and 89th Street; in 1904, when a fire broke out, she tried to get through police lines to rescue her tenants; no one was killed.

In 1909 The Times reported that her remarkable house, built and furnished at a cost of $1 million, was in foreclosure, its limestone badly discolored, its great glass dome cracked.

By the 1920s the house was the headquarters of Olivotti & Company decorators, with apartments upstairs. Polo Ralph Lauren arrived in the late 1980s, and the building is still a Ralph Lauren store. The company has just treated it to an extensive exterior restoration, simultaneous with the completion of a second store across the street on the site of Consuelo Vanderbilt’s mansion. For the new building, Weddle Gilmore Architects has produced an assured and demure neo-Classic design, French in character. At the time of proposal it was challenged by some preservationists as a fake, but as it stands, it is magnificent.

The peculiar story of Mrs. Waldo is not unusual; New York has other private houses that for unexplained reasons were never occupied by their rich owners. But Mrs. Waldo’s case is a particularly sorry one; although she had inherited millions, in 1915 The Times reported that she died in debt for $135,000.