Trouble with Grand Lofts

I registered here to post the latest developement with Grand Lofts on the corner of 11th St and Grand Ave.

I might not work in downtown LA but I'm a student at the USC School of Architecture. I wanted to live in a downtown loft near campus and I had special interest in the Grand Loft property mostly because it's one of the few buildings that's adaptive reuse and actually a hard loft (unlike the new towers under construction that call themselves lofts). I looked at the property and went on all the hard hat tours the developers offered and put a deposit down on a penthouse unit that's 1551 sq ft. In January, we were told the building would be finished by June which would have been great because i could move in before the school year started. Well, nedless to say, we've finaly received our COO after nearly 5 months of delays.

The strangest part of the whole process was the last 3 weeks. We did our final walkthrough but the abnormal length of time before we were told we could close after the walkthrough was suspect.

To give you a little background on the project, the building does not rest on a parking structure or have a parking structure to support the 66 units. Instead, the property adjacent to the Grand Lofts property, now an empty lot used for the staging of the construction, was to be developed as a few stories of parking garage with a high rise conduminium on top. We were told we'd be given two parking spaces per unit when this property would be finished. Construction was supposed to begin once construction on the Grand Loft poperty has finished.

Just yesterday, after we had wired the final payment, we received a contract from Lee Homes that had to be singed, sent back and faxed back within a few hours. Hidden within this 200 page document were a few paragraphs that basically said - and i'll summarize here - we wouldn't be garunteed the two parking spaces we were told each unit would have and signing this document would release Lee Homes from any liability.

We learned that Lee Homes, who owned the property adjacent to the Grand Loft property, no longer own it. The person who owns the property now isn't required to build a parking structure there or if he did build one, parking for the 66 Grand Loft units.

Luckily, we were able to put a stop on our wire transfer and have since been trying to contact Jeff Lee, the head of Lee Homes.

In talking to our real estate agent, we discovered that since my unit was to be the first to close, we are the only ones to have seen this document, which is an agreement outside of escrow. We have started to contact all of the other 65 residents to notify them of this document and to decide on a course of action in the matter but one thing is for sure, without garunteed parking in downtown LA, a poperty's value will be greatly diminished.

I'll try to keep this forum updated on this issue if anyone would like it.