In "normal" recessions, high end homes usually keep selling, and owners of them keep remodelling or adding on or remodelling, thus providing work for building trades otherwise bereft of prospects.
The current financial climate with attending tight credit markets has made Orlando a real estate market with blue light specials on mansions.
For people with liquid assets, think monied for generations family members, such recessions and even depressions provide opportunity to buy at bargain basement prices.
So y'all come on down to Orlando and buy some mansions, ye oil sheiks, Rockefellers, Chases and others. We need the tax revenue.
Call me; we can slurp some 'sters and drink domestics at Lee & Rick's Oyster Bar.
[Custom builders, stuck with luxurious homes they have been unable to sell in the humbled real-estate market, now appear to be the ones taking a bath.
Some are trying to unload masterpiece homes at half the price they had been asking in 2007. Others are faced with having to wait for buyers for the first time in more than a decade. And still others warn that this may be the end of the speculative, high-end-home market in Orlando.
"We built this at the high end of the market, and we're going to have to sell at the low end," Kim Goehring, a longtime custom-home builder, said recently as he walked through what was, in 2007, the official show home of the International Builders' Show when that giant convention was in town.
Inside the house, a curved, wooden door leads to a study resplendent with leather floors, leather inlays in the coffered ceiling, and a globe of the world centered in the chandelier. Travertine tile lines the concave ceiling of one of the two rooms in the wine cellar. A bank of custom cabinetry frames stainless appliances — and that's in the master bedroom.
When he completed the 6,600-square-foot home on the main drag of Orlando's Baldwin Park in 2006, Goehring said he expected it to sell within two or three months, based on demand at the time. Now, years later, Casa Teresa is a blue-light special, with its original $4 million price tag slashed in half.]
(emphasis added)
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-empty-custom-homes-080609,0,2233008.story
Who the hell builds with leather freakin' floors?
