Kona Kohala Blog

Golf Villas at Mauna Lani Resort, a nicely laid out condo complex positioned between fairways of the Francis H. I'l Brown championship golf course, now has an affordable 3 bedroom, 3 bath unit listed at just $585,000.  On Sunday, this unit was the best priced one at $619,000.  The seller wanted to know why it wasn't selling?  The answer was the maintenance fees which are currently $1,200 per month.

How do we deal with that?  The seller can't give a buyer more than a small percentage of the sales price at closing by federal law so a big credit for the fee wouldn't work.  How about lowering the price, lowering it so much that it is the equivalent of nearly 2 1/2 years of maintenance fees?  That'll take the sting out; so we did.  We dropped the price $34,000 to $585,000.  If you're interested, contact me now, don't wait!  The MLS # is 219504; pictures and videos on this site, look at our listings.

Here's some more kernals of knowledge to ponder.  Did you know that the percentage of "distressed" homes, those that are short sales or potential foreclosures, is about 6% of all the mortgages out there.  That means that 94% of the home owners with mortgages are okay, they're making their payments even in these difficult financial times.  So, for 6% of the mortgage holders we are going to change the contracts, the written agreements between the lender and borrower so that the borrower can supposedly make their payments and not defautl on their loans.  We are going to change the contracts, the legal instruments signed by both parties that should hold up in any court in the land.  The house and senate have agreed that changing the contracts is a good idea.

Now, let's move to AIG.  There is a major fuss being made about executive "retention bonuses" being paid to 73 employees, 11 of whom no longer work for the company.  O'Bama (it is St. Paticks day) and his cohorts in the legislature are calling for heads to roll, these bonuses are wrong they should be stopped or taxed at 90%, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah but they are contractual obligations.  We as legislators, we who now own 80% of the company through our bailouts, can't possibly go back on a contract.

And, says the administration, please don't blame our Secretary of the Treasury for this.  Yes, he was involved as the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank who personally structured the AIG bailout with full knowledge of the bonuses one year ago but how could he have known?  How could he not have known is a better question.

This administration has more balls in the air than a juggler at the San Francisco Renaisannce Faire.  How are we, let alone the regulators, supposed to follow all this.  These guys are putting David Copperfield to shame with all the smoke and mirrors in play today. 

Will someone please, please tell these idiots this economy is not rocket science.  History has seen this over and over again.  Ask yourselves what would Reagan do?  It's that simple.  The recession of the 80's was ever so much worse than this and he fixed it in a few years.  Why is this administration making this so tough?  Is there something else going on that they don't want us to see?  All I want is a business friendly environment and the rest will take care of itself.  Encourage people to be creative, don't penalize them for it.  Create tax breaks for those who put other people to work.  Give them credits and deductions for starting businesses, it's not cheap to do that.  Take away the incredible costly overhead of compliance issues for business, reduce liability to some reasonable level so we can reduce insurance in all industries.  Use common sense, that's why we have it and it's all going to waste right now.