"By Next Year, Every Litigation Attorney in Town Will Have A Case Like This."

That's Miami Beach attorney Aaron Resnick (not pictured above), proprietor of the website www.recovermydeposit.com, talking about cases seeking return of investor monies in failing South Florida condos.

From Rebecca Wakefield's column in the Miami Sun Post:

“The experience most people have is one of frustration,” says Resnick. “That it’s taking so long, they’re not getting answers and the only time they hear from the developer is with a letter telling them the day of reckoning is at hand.”

Apparently, Resnick tells me, there are a lot of laws on the books designed to protect new condo buyers, but few know about them. These laws give the buyer some room to cancel a contract, or get a deposit back, or renegotiate the price. Reasons could include if the buyer doesn’t close within two years of signing the contract, or if the developer suckers the buyer with false/misleading promotional materials or makes material changes to what was purchased.

“You would be very surprised how many developers didn’t comply with the requirements and therefore don’t get those protections,” Resnick adds. “This can happen on expensive units like the Apogee to smaller units like the Filling Station Lofts in the Design District.”

Resnick says he started getting the occasional call from unhappy buyers about a year ago. Now he gets four or five calls a day. “With 70,000 condos supposed to come online, if even 10 percent want to get out, that will be enough to keep everyone busy,” he reckons. “By next year, every litigation attorney in town will have a case like this.”

I'm not so sure about this. I've looked at a few of these cases too, and there are significant hurdles to recovering the deposit, although Aaron is right that there are several underutilized Florida statutes that can come into play.

I hope he makes a lot of money for his clients, and succeeds on a few of these cases so the law can be better defined in terms of the duties and obligations of the developers.

The photo, btw, is from one of those swanky South Florida condo launch parties from a few years back, which now feels like so long ago....