Laura Kusisto

speaker

689 appearances 14 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2017 last heard Nov 2023

Laura Kusisto’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · First-Time Condo Buyers Get a Boost from the Government · 15 Aug 2019 podcast

Yeah, exactly.

I think when people, particularly people on the coast, maybe think about condos, you think about ones being bought by Russian billionaires.

But these are really more your run-of-the-mill condos.

I talked to one guy in Seattle who totally priced out of the housing market in Seattle for a single-family home, but he can afford a $300,000, $400,000 condo in Seattle.

That's the kind of market we're talking about.

So there's this sort of ripple effect where if your neighbor in a condo building goes into foreclosure, they stop painting their balcony, they stop washing their windows, they stop paying their maintenance dues in particular.

There's a very kind of quick cascading effect.

The other concern is condos can be pretty easily turned into rentals.

And so the fear is that a rental building tends to be a little less nice than a condo building.

And so just generally, they're just a little bit of a riskier investment for people.

That's exactly it, yeah.

If you've ever been in a rental building, for the most part, they tend to be a little bit less nice than a condo building.

And so that can erode the value of the unit that you purchased there.

And we saw this during the financial crisis.

Foreclosures were widespread everywhere.

But in places like, I mean, if you went to Florida, one foreclosure in a building just so quickly dominoed to hundreds of foreclosures in a building.

Yeah, so the idea is that normally the sort of longer-term policy has been that the government will only make a low-down payment loan in a condo building if the building itself has been underwritten and approved.

And that's a very cumbersome process.

Buildings don't like to have to go through it.

They have traditionally had to certify every two years.

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