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This is an agency, not a building
From:
-Anonymous-
Date posted:
7/11/2006
Years at this apartment:
2006
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2006
1 response
Citiapartments is a local agency which finds apartments for prosptective tenants for free (landlords pay). They have about a gazillion signs around the city, one on nearly every decent building on every block. Problem is they never have ANY apartments available at all. May be why they never answer the phone. One day while walking around apartment hunting, I probably saw 25 of their signs on buildings. After about a week of calling I finally got through to somebody, who informed me they had no vacancies in my range (which coincidentally was not limited). If you manage to get a hold of somebody there at the beginning of the month, when their listings come out, you have half a chance of finding a place through them.
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User Responses
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From:
Anonymous
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Date:
09/14/2007
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Citiapartments is a group of related Lembi-family partnerships that own and manage over 260 apartment buildings, and a few deluxe short-term residences (CitiSuites) and boutique hotels in the City. Their business plan is to increase rents by making lower-class apartments more marketable to higher-paying renters. They have rapidly purchased over 200 older (ie, rent-controlled) SF buildings in the last ten years, recently using mortgages packaged (along with unrelated commerical properties) by investment banks into securities for private "collateralized debt obligation" (CDO) bonds with various risk levels and interest rates. These are the same securities which investors had trouble pricing during the recent (and current) liquidity crisis in the financial markets. In addition to such first mortgage financing, second mortgage "mezzanine" loans are obtained to pay for the improvements and tenant buyouts which bring on higher rents. This huge amount of debt sometimes causes operational difficulties, and vendors such as maintenance firms and construction crews often have to deal with long delays in payments. This is a bit ironic, since Citiapartments is very aggressive in managing removal and/or buyouts of late-paying or low rent tenants. Citiapartments (aka Skyline Realty, or The Lembi Group) is an enormously successful but highly leveraged outfit which has monoplized purhase of rent-controlled apartment buildings in San Francisco. Look at the rent heat map of the City (craigstatsa) and you can see what's going on!
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