Washed It!

Spread over 157 acres, Laguna Lakes is a gated community located in the scenic South Fort Myers in Southwest Florida. Beautifully landscaped in natural surroundings, Laguna Lakes offers a fishing pier and almost 33 acres of lakes.

The community features 614 single-family as well as coach homes and is conveniently located near the beaches, as well as to the shopping and dining districts in Florida. The homes offer different floor plans depending on the needs of the buyer and their preferences.

Mainly a condo neighborhood, Laguna Lakes features 236 2-storey buildings that include both coach and single-family homes. With a high quality construction and beautifully landscaped tropical surroundings, Laguna Lakes is an ideal community for those wishing to move to Florida.

Some of the amenities that are available for the residents of Laguna Lakes include a large recreation center that offers a children’s play area, a spa, swimming pools, conference rooms and sports facilities such as a racquet-ball court, tennis court, sand volleyball court and billiards.

The swimming pool itself draws inspiration from the Caribbean resorts and features an infinity edge that drops into the lake.

The Laguna Lakes community also features a clubhouse, which is believed to be its main attraction for buyers. This clubhouse boasts a fully furnished dining room, completely equipped kitchen and a billiard room for recreational purposes. A family style room is also part of this clubhouse where one can enjoy get-together and other social activities.

For those wishing to enjoy an upscale lifestyle in a tropical setting, Laguna Lakes is an ideal location.

An established gated boating community, Caloosa Yacht and Racquet Club is located along the Caloosahatchee River, just off historic McGregor Boulevard on College Parkway. It’s only 15-20 minutes away from Fort Myers beaches and other local attractions.

While a small community, with just 121 single family homes and a few low-rise condos, the Caloosa Yacht and Racquet Club is an ideal location for residents looking for a private, fun, safe and peaceful place to live in.

This community is best known for its 56-slip deep water marina found on the Intracoastal Waterway where residents are offered berths for rent.The marina can accommodate vessels up to 36 feet long.

Other amenities for homeowners in the community include four excellently built tennis courts, a community pool, a four-star Blue Coyote restaurant which provides the perfect ambiance and environment to relax and have a good time, a fishing lake, a park where children can play, and shuffleboard.

A typical single family home built on 1,739 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms should cost around $259,969. Built close to the 22-acre lake and 4-acre park these homes are an ideal location for families looking to settle down in a safe and relaxing environment.

Distinct features of homes in the area include a foyer, walk in closets, sliding and wind rated windows, central heating, granite counters and maple cabinets in the kitchens and bathrooms and carpet and tile flooring.

This is a small, exclusive neighbourhood in which properties sell quickly. The limited space, with the advantage of the marina ensures prices stay competitive. Those wanting to move to this development need to keep their ear to the ground as they don’t come up often!

For former insiders at some of the several hundred banks that collapsed during the financial crisis and in its aftermath, a day of reckoning has arrived.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has told dozens of former bank officers and directors that it has drawn up lawsuits accusing them of misdeeds such as fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. The federal agency is seeking damages to help offset losses in the nation’s deposit insurance fund.

It’s time, the FDIC warns these officials, to sit down and work out settlements — or head to court to decide the matters there.

The letters being sent by the agency are “very detailed,” said Jeffrey A. Tisdale, a Los Angeles lawyer for former officials of five banks targeted by the agency.

“I mean eight to 10 single-spaced pages of purported misdeeds,” he said.

The showdowns follow FDIC probes that typically take well over a year.

“We’re only doing this after careful investigation. We don’t bring suit every time a bank fails,” said Richard Osterman, the FDIC’s acting general counsel.

The FDIC board has authorized suits seeking to recover more than $2 billion from more than 80 former bank officials, up from about 50 a month ago, Osterman said. The number could multiply as the agency works through its investigative backlog.

The agency could end up suing or settling with former insiders of about one-quarter of the more than 300 banks that have failed since the start of 2008, officials say.

“This is only the first wave,” Tisdale said. “I’ve got my next five-year professional plan laid out pretty well.”

Although the FDIC says it will try to settle the cases, officials expect to file a significant number of suits. Criminal charges could result in a few cases.

“We are investigating [criminal] bank fraud and related cases in many different parts of the country, including in California,” said Fred Gibson, deputy inspector general at the agency.

So far only two civil suits have been filed. The first, filed in July, accuses four executives of Pasadena’s defunct IndyMac Bank of negligence in granting construction and development loans that the suit says were unlikely to be repaid. The defendants are contesting the suit, which seeks $300 million in damages.

Last week, the FDIC sued 11 former insiders at defunct Heritage Community Bank in Glenwood, Ill. Calling the case “regrettable and wrong,” defense lawyers said in a statement that their clients, in failing to foresee the economic meltdown, were no different from Wall Street and the FDIC itself.

Tisdale concurs that the FDIC is going after people for failing to accurately predict the future.

“The economy is the real culprit here,” he said. “There was no way to plan for real estate values dropping 30% to 50% throughout California, Nevada and Arizona.”

But Darren Robbins, a San Diego lawyer who specializes in filing investment fraud suits, says the FDIC has plenty to work with just by looking at what banks said about their assets toward the end of the boom.

“It’s our belief that in places like Illinois, Georgia, California and Arizona there was an inordinate amount of game-playing with financial statements in ‘07 and ‘08,” said Robbins, whose firm has fraud suits pending against several casualties of the bust, including PFF Bancorp, the former parent company of Pomona’s PFF Bank & Trust, which failed in November 2008.

In targeting the former officials, the FDIC typically also has its eyes on insurance companies that would be on the hook for damages stemming from alleged misconduct by the bankers. In many cases, the FDIC formally gave notice of possible litigation months ago, just before the expiration of the relevant insurance policies, to ensure that the coverage would apply.

Some policies covering directors and officers don’t apply to actions by the FDIC. In such cases, the agency is going after bank officials only if they have sufficient assets to justify the expense and risk of litigation, Osterman said.

The FDIC’s litigation strategy borrows from a playbook the agency used after the savings and loan meltdown of about two decades ago. From 1986 through 1996 the FDIC recovered $5.1 billion from former insiders at failed banks and savings and loans, Osterman said. That’s a small fraction of the eventual cost of the S&L crisis.

scott.reckard@latimes.com
FDIC prepares to crack down on officials of failed banks

The building that is likely to be the biggest commercial real estate development started in Los Angeles County this year is not part of a movie studio, aerospace venture or other type of business readily associated with the area.

It’s all about hot sauce.

Huy Fong Foods, best known as the maker of Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce with a rooster depicted on the label, broke ground this week on a 655,000-square-foot, $40-million headquarters and factory in Irwindale.

The project will nearly triple the space occupied by Huy Fong, which now operates out of two buildings in Rosemead that it will give up when the new facility is finished.

Demand for the product has increased every year for the last 30 years, said David Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant who said he founded the company when he couldn’t find hot sauce he liked. In 1980, Tran rented 2,500 square feet in Chinatown and started making sauce from chilies he bought at Grand Central Market. He delivered the final product to Asian markets in a Chevy van.

The company currently makes more than 20 million bottles of the spicy concoction annually by working around the clock.

“We are at full capacity,” Tran said. “We need a bigger building to make the hot sauce.”

Huy Fong rolls out 100 tons of the red stuff a day now and will increase its volume “rapidly” in the new facility, Tran said. The company aims to increase its manufacturing capacity tenfold by 2016 to meet projected demand.

Employment at the company is expected to triple when the move is made to the new facility. Currently, Huy Fong has 70 workers during jalapeno season in the summer and fall when the peppers are pouring in, said operations manager Donna Lam.

Construction is being overseen by Seventh Street Development, a Long Beach real estate company selected by the city of Irwindale to develop the blighted 23-acre site at Azusa Canyon Road and Cypress Street that had been vacant for more than a decade.

The site was mentioned in a recent Times story about redevelopment properties that were earmarked by cities for affordable housing — in accordance with state law — but not used entirely for that purpose.

Irwindale will finance most of Huy Fong’s $15-million purchase of the property. Seventh Street expects to finish the Huy Fong building by next fall.

Like most companies that move to new quarters, Huy Fong won’t be moving far.

“With many of its employees living in the area, it was important to Huy Fong to stay in the San Gabriel Valley, which has been its home since 1987,” said Craig Furniss, a principal at Seventh Street Development. “Irwindale was one of the few areas able to accommodate Huy Fong’s space requirement and still make financial sense.”

The new building will have such environmentally friendly attributes as a white reflective roof, skylights and storm-water catch basins. The California Mission-style building will include 26,000 square feet of office space, 150,000 square feet of manufacturing space and 480,000 square feet of warehouse space under one roof. Huy Fong needs lots of room to store sauce crushed during pepper season so it can keep bottling year-round.

Sriracha (sree-rah-chah) is a traditional Southeast Asian sauce named after a Thai seaside town. Tran’s garlicky interpretation uses whole chilies, seeds and all, and comes out thicker than typical Louisiana-style hot sauces. That’s the way he likes it.

“Almost any meal I eat with hot sauce,” he said.

roger.vincent@latimes.com
Sriracha chili-sauce factory to spice up a bleak lot in Irwindale

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been good for Frank Amador Jr.’s business, a small Buena Park machine shop where workers make aluminum parts for the B-1 and B-2 bombers.

Sales have tripled since the war began, to $8 million a year. The payroll has doubled to 28 workers.

But now, after one of the biggest military buildups in decades, Amador is among the thousands of aerospace suppliers across Southern California bracing for a downturn, a slide that could have gut-wrenching consequences for an economy struggling to recover.

“It won’t be long before we’re all scrambling for business,” said Amador, who has been through a few boom-and-bust cycles over the last three decades. “I’ve seen this before. There’s a long road ahead. I just hope we can hold on.”

Aerospace has been one of the few bright spots in the region’s dismal economy, offering high-wage engineering, manufacturing and administrative jobs at a time when construction, real estate and banking work has grown scarce.

Nearly 5,500 aerospace suppliers — many with a handful of workers — collectively employ more than 130,000 people in California. Most of these small shops depend on subcontracts from giant defense contractors, which have announced a wave of job cuts in recent weeks, citing expectations of a protracted contraction of Pentagon spending.

Northrop Grumman Corp., the nation’s third-largest defense contractor and one of the largest private employers in the region, said last week that it would eliminate 500 jobs in its aerospace division, with most of the cuts expected to hit its sprawling facilities in El Segundo and Redondo Beach. Also last week, Raytheon Co. issued pink slips to about 130 employees in its Space and Airborne Systems division in El Segundo.

Boeing Co., the second-largest defense contractor, plans to trim its military aircraft business and cut workers, starting with 10% of the group’s executives. Boeing has more than 20,000 workers in Southern California at sprawling facilities in places like Seal Beach, El Segundo and Huntington Beach.

Top-ranked Lockheed Martin Corp., which operates its famed Skunk Works research facility in Palmdale, said last month that about 25% of its executives had opted for a voluntary retirement program designed to cut costs. More than 600 vice presidents and directors applied for the program.

“Eventually, these cuts will work their way down the supply chain,” said James McAleese, a lawyer in McLean, Va., who specializes in military contracts. “Prime contractors will squeeze their suppliers to bring down their costs.”

Paul H. Nisbet, a defense analyst who has been following the aerospace industry since the 1970s, expects that many small suppliers will be forced to go out of business, merge with rivals or cut employees to survive.

That’s what happened after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, in a downturn that fundamentally altered the defense industry.

The last time defense spending plunged, from 1989 to 1994, the amount that the Pentagon budgeted for research and buying weapons plummeted 20%. During that period, the U.S. aerospace industry job base shrank 25% nationwide.

California saw its aerospace industry employment drop 40%, the bulk of that in the Southland, as a quarter of the local defense industry suppliers went out of business, said Jack Kyser, an economist with the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Those that survived cut back on workers, slashed employees’ hours or got into a different line of business altogether, Kyser said. Smaller firms were hardest hit because they tend to manufacture only a handful of products and for a small number of customers.

“We’re at an inflection point in the aerospace industry,” he said. “We have our fingers crossed that we don’t see cutbacks as we did before. But there are already indications that jobs are going to be cut.”

Pentagon officials confirmed that spending would slow, although they said this downturn would not be as severe as the last one.

“This is not the 1990s,” Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said during a media conference last month. “But neither is it the 2000s, when we had double-digit year-on-year growth and we could always reach for more money.”

Citing the end of combat operations in Iraq and the rising federal deficit, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he is looking to trim $100 billion from the Pentagon budget over the next five years.

“The golden era of aerospace has passed,” said Tom Captain, principal of Deloitte’s aerospace and defense consulting practice. “There is now a siren call for businesses to transfer from a hardware-based machine shop to a software-based technologically advanced firm.”

Aerospace suppliers brace for defense spending cuts

Mike and Ellen Kahara knew times were tough. They’d run up about $30,000 in debt on their credit cards and had fallen about $8,000 behind on their mortgage payments.

But they didn’t know how tough things had gotten until a stranger showed up at their Long Beach home last month to inform them that Wells Fargo had sold the house out from under them and that the new owner — a San Diego real estate investment firm — wanted them out as soon as possible.

“We were shocked,” Ellen Kahara, 32, told me. “We’d been given no notice by the bank. Suddenly we were being told that we had no home.”

Their shock was all the greater because they’d been told less than a week earlier that Wells Fargo had rejected their application for a loan modification. Within just a few days, the bank had turned around and sold the property — even though Wells had assured the couple in writing that it wouldn’t do this.

“I have never seen it happen anywhere near this fast,” said Laurence Clarke, a Los Angeles real estate attorney who has handled numerous foreclosure cases. “This is a particularly egregious situation.”

The Kaharas are in the same boat as thousands of other homeowners who have fallen behind on mortgage payments. About 4.5% of U.S. homes were somewhere in the foreclosure process during the second quarter, according to the Mortgage Bankers Assn.

You could say the Kaharas have only themselves to blame. They entered into a complex, interest-only loan when they purchased their two-bedroom house for nearly $300,000 in 2004. Before long, their monthly payments had risen to almost $3,000.

But, like many others, they also got hammered by the lousy economy. Mike Kahara’s small construction company foundered as business dried up. Ellen helped out by working as a nanny, but it wasn’t enough to keep them afloat.

“It was really stressful,” Mike Kahara, 34, recalled. “We kept asking our creditors what we could do to work things out. They just said we should make more money.”

The couple received a notice of default on their mortgage from Wells Fargo in August 2009. But a bank rep said there might be some hope. The Kaharas were advised to seek assistance through the Home Affordable Modification Program, a federal program intended to help homeowners by modifying loan terms.

In December, they were notified by Wells that they were eligible for a three-month trial loan modification that would lower their monthly payments to about $1,400. The Kaharas managed to make all subsequent payments in full.

After the three months were up, Ellen Kahara said, they were told by Wells that their case was still under review and that they should keep making the $1,400 payments. They did.

The bank continued requesting paperwork as part of its review process. Ellen said she called Wells on Aug. 9 and for days afterward to check on the status of their loan modification but never got a call back.

The Kaharas received a letter from Wells dated Aug. 11 saying that their application for a permanent loan modification had been rejected. The letter said the Kaharas would have 30 days to discuss other options available to them.

“No foreclosure sale will be conducted and you will not lose your home during this 30-day period,” the letter said.

But on Aug. 18 there was a knock at the door around 8 in the morning. Mike Kahara said a young man wearing a white polo shirt and dark slacks introduced himself as Sebastian Cruz of the investment firm Pacifica Cos.

Cruz said his firm had purchased the house and that he would offer the Kaharas $1,500 if they’d agree to vacate the property within two weeks.

He produced a document with Pacifica letterhead informing the Kaharas that their home “has changed ownership through the foreclosure process.” It threatened legal action if the couple didn’t move out.

“I thought it was a scam at first,” Mike Kahara said. “Then I realized he was serious.”

Suddenly, their house is taken over

More of the shine of the Golden State’s real estate market lost a bit more of its luster as the total value of California’s properties fell for the second year in a row — and for the second time since records were first kept in 1933 at the depths of the Great Depression.

The value of all types of properties fell 1.8% this year to $4.4 trillion, the California Board of Equalization reported Thursday. The total value fell 2.4% last year.

Forty-eight of California’s 58 counties saw totals fall — nine by more than 5%. Only two counties, oil-rich Kern and tourist-destination San Francisco, posted expansions of their property tax rolls of 2% or more.

The negative numbers make for more bad news for county governments. They’ve had to curtail spending on basic municipal services because falling values have resulted in lower property tax revenues.

“It’s a decline that’s outside of their control” and unlikely to reverse itself until California starts creating tens of thousands of new jobs, said Board of Equalization Vice Chairman Jerome Horton.

The contraction of the last two years contrasts with California’s historic growth in its real estate value, Horton said, with “constant increases of 5% to 15% per year” for the last 77 years.

“Those numbers tell us we have a ways to go, and we have some work to do to bring balance back in our economy,” he said.

Some experts suggest that things could get even worse before they get better.

Many homeowners purchased or refinanced residences in 2005 or 2006 and could face interest rate hikes from the variable-rate mortgages, said Tracey Seslen, a real estate professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Tight financial markets and underwriting standards could make it hard for them to refinance at lower rates, she said.

“With the stricter lending measures in place, removal of the home-buyer’s tax credit and with uncertainty in the economy and the jobs picture, we have a large confluence of factors that are all going to be putting downward pressure on the housing market,” she said.

Other housing specialists, though, think that the board’s data, based on Jan. 1 figures, already may be out of date.

“In many areas of California, prices have found a floor and have even recorded three or four months of guarded recovery,” said Stuart A. Gabriel, director of the Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

“Hopefully, we have found or are close to a bottom” of the market,” Gabriel said, “and, we’ll be able to see some recovery of prices.”

The board’s data found that Los Angeles County, which accounted for about a quarter of the value of all property statewide, lost 1.8% of its property value. The steepest drops were in the high-desert cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, local officials said.

Plummeting commercial property values also are contributing to the reduction in the size of tax rolls, Los Angeles County Assessor Robert Quon said.

The county got hit with a one-two punch of “fewer changes of ownership and less new construction,” he said.

The weak market spurred Los Angeles assessors to review about 600,000 homes and condominiums. They lowered annual property tax bills on 400,000 properties purchased between July 1, 2003, and June 30, 2009, Quon said.

By getting their properties reassessed to reduce taxes, homeowners were able to save an average of $1,800 on a single-family home and $1,500 on a condominium, according to the county.

Across Southern California, property values fell 4.4% in Riverside County, 4.3% in San Bernardino County, 1.5% in San Diego County, 0.5% in Orange County and 0.3% in Ventura County.

Inland areas lost about twice as much of their property value as coastal areas did. The state’s hardest-hit counties were in the Sacramento and Northern San Joaquin valleys and the Inland Empire, the board said.

marc.lifsher@latiimes.com
Value of California’s properties falls 1.8% to $4.4 trillion

Powerful Hurricane Earl spun toward the East Coast on Wednesday, driving tourists from North Carolina’s vacation islands and threatening to bring damaging winds and waves to the Atlantic seaboard through Labor Day weekend.

Democratic Govs. Bev Perdue of North Carolina and Martin O’Malley of Maryland declared states of emergency in their states, and federal authorities have warned people along the coast to be prepared to evacuate if necessary.

The evacuation of the Outer Banks, a stretch of thin barrier islands, had begun in North Carolina, and hundreds of cars were backed up on the highway that is the sole link to the mainland. Earl’s strongest winds were expected to hit the coast Thursday night into Friday morning.

Earl’s effect on the East Coast will depend on when it makes its expected turn to the northeast.

A later-than-expected turn could mean the storm’s eye makes landfall on the extreme eastern tip of North Carolina as a Category 3 hurricane late Thursday or early Friday.

If that happens, hurricane-force winds could reach Long Island, N.Y., and Cape Cod, Mass.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, declared a state of emergency as a precaution, allowing the state to mobilize staff and resources before the storm. Emergency officials as far north as Maine urged people to have disaster plans and supplies ready.

Earl was on track to approach the North Carolina shore and then blow north along the coast, but forecasters cautioned that it was still too early to tell how close the storm might come to land.

The National Weather Service issued a hurricane warning for much of the North Carolina coast and hurricane watches from Virginia to Delaware.

Not since Hurricane Bob in 1991 has such a powerful storm had such a large swath of the East Coast in its sights, said Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center.

“A slight shift of that track to the west is going to impact a great deal of real estate with potential hurricane-force winds,” Feltgen said.
Hurricane Earl approaches East Coast

After backing down from a contentious proposal to demolish the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel, the owner has unveiled plans to construct a high-rise real estate development next to the Space Age landmark that would transform the tenor of Century City’s streets and dramatically alter the skyline.

The $1.5-billion proposal calls for two 46-story skyscrapers holding hundreds of condominiums and offices to be built behind the renowned hotel on Avenue of the Stars. Nearly half of the guest rooms would be replaced by luxury condos as part of a top-to-bottom makeover.

A large portion of the lobby would be hollowed out and left open in a move to connect the new buildings, shops and plazas with nearby streets and improve the flow of pedestrians. Planning and construction are slated for completion by 2014.

The proposal represents a turnabout by Los Angeles developer Michael Rosenfeld, who has earned support from preservationists who once opposed him. Rosenfeld has also won a tentative nod from the mayor and a key city councilman for his revised plans.