O Fortuna

Condos may not be great to own, but they sure are wonderful to rent.

As a renter for more than a decade, I've always been completely bummed out by the lack of interesting details and, frankly, attention to quality that you get in an apartment that's been built to rent.

Well, after my years of jealously eyeing my friends' condos, it seems that fate, like an overzealous Labrador, has laid a dead squirrel at my feet in the form of the housing bust.

Condo owners, beset by burgeoning maintenance fees that only grow larger as banks foreclose on their neighbors, are renting out their hardwood-floored, granite-countertopped, cathedral-ceilinged aeries.

The prices are not out of line with those of the built-to-rent market. Are condo owners, who might care only to cover their nut and are not looking to operate a rental business, comfortable with lower profits than rental-builders?

There's a corporate finance case to be written on this, and I would do it, were it not for the fact that I already spent 3 frustrating hours on an M&A case because I couldn't get my cell references to copy and paste.

Anyway, here's a few pics of my new current fave: http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/apa/1064605381.html

Sigh...if only I could move to Seattle in April. But I guess everyone takes their turn on the wheel.