Andy Sirkin on TIC's

Andy Sirkin, the well known San Francisco TIC attorney spoke at our Pacific Union office meeting this morning. One thing I've been curious about is his estimate on how long it would take for new TIC buildings of 3 to 6 units to win the lottery and complete conversion if you started today. "20 years" was his guess. In other words, if you're buying into a newly formed TIC - plan on selling it as a TIC.

Among the MANY other tidbits of info I gleamed from a very informative hour are:
- Sterling Bank is pretty much the only fractional lender left - other than when Builders have gotten previous commitments from other fractional lenders.
- the 2010 condo conversion lottery will happen in the next couple of weeks. Those who have been in for 7 years are in "Pool A" and he thinks they have a 90% chance of winning the right to convert. Those in "Pool B" may have a 1% to 2% chance of winning because there are so many tickets in that pool.
- almost all of the news for TIC's was bad - except for 2-unit buildings who qualify for lottery bypass - if you can bypass the lottery (and there are 2-unit buildings that can't due to eviction history or only one owner-occupier) the good news is that processing times are much faster - technically a 2-unit might be able to complete a conversion in as little as 15 months due to processing of as little as 3 months.