[Post refers to Jan. 27th. Sorry for the late post(s). I was told my blog was not up to date, so here are some posts]
After making our proposals in the summer of 2009, we finally got an email stating that a decision had been made for early buyers and that we would have a meeting on January 26th to discuss. Also noted in the email was that the meeting was to be "expected to be a brief discussion". This screamed that nothing would be done for us...
I go to the meeting and they schedule to have it on the unit on the 40th floor condo unit, probably to keep any rioting and yelling isolated, usually we would have the meeting in our common floors. At the beginning of the meeting, Ira K. Glasser, the rep from Morgan Stanley, states what I expected - "There will be no compensation given". Myself and many early buyers are frustrated/irate/mad/angry. I won't go into too many details as to why I am and others were frustrated as it's pretty well documented in my blog, but just the fact that we've been in limbo w/ the condo for well over a year as the prices have drop precipitously, that we've given promises of price guarantees, and that we had to move into conditions that were less than ideal.
Most of the very upset people spoke first, the complaints were mostly the ones mentioned in this blog. There was one gentleman who spoke of how he even set up a meeting to discuss w/ developers before moving in about the prospect of falling prices and the fact that he only closed only based on that meeting and the assurance the value would still increase. Ira's feedback to those meetings were that developers (the ones that defaulted), probably in their mind, believed the prices of units would still rise and therefore was no culpability on the original lender or Morgan Stanley today and if the resident wanted to take legal action, then Morgan Stanley is more than welcome it. (translation: we're bigger than you, bring it.) I'm assuming he didn't file any suits.
The rage went on for a while until someone said, paraphrasing (he said this much more elegantly) - "hey, we should just calm down and accept our losses and move on. The best thing we can do is promote the building and make sure it sells out." Really??!! Someone responded jokingly (though I'm not sure 100%) - "Are you working for the lender or something?" In my head... I was thinking the exact same thing. So per the Internet standard, WTF came to my mind. Later, I found out that this resident had actually bought a second unit and is now on the condo association board - so you can see where his loyalties lie.
So in the building, there are some people like the person above that have so much money that they've accepted their losses and double down on their investments and purchase another million dollar unit, for me, I'm still upset; I've waited a good 20 months when I could have ditched my unit waiting for a response only to see my unit to drop in price dramatically. I feel like my move-in conditions were not ready (see entire blog) while others didn't move in and had a chance to negotiate to lower price which I was told not possible.
Is it of value for me to be still upset? I'm sure some people just tell me to let it go, but given the many months of writing proposals, emails, and meetings to come to this conclusion is a very bitter pill for me to swallow. Maybe it's time to bend over and just let the ownership give it to me. Wait, they already have.
