plus 4, Insurer tosses out realtor’s stolen Chrysler SRT8 claim - Vancouver Sun

Insurer tosses out realtor’s stolen Chrysler SRT8 claim - Vancouver Sun
Daimler chief: No recovery until 2012 - New Zealand Herald
Seniors suffer in troubled California subdivision - Post-Bulletin
Man outwaits all others for bargains - Leaf Chronicle
Residents' golden years tarnished by housing bust in Southern ... - Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Insurer tosses out realtor’s stolen Chrysler SRT8 claim - Vancouver Sun

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 07:40 AM PST

On the afternoon of Sept. 9, realtor Greg Hernandez parked his muscle car -- a 2006 Chrysler 300 SRT8 capable of 170 miles per hour -- outside a Surrey pub and went for lunch with two colleagues in a nearby Vietnamese restaurant.

Hernandez has a love of powerful North American cars and the 300 SRT8 stands for 300 horsepower, street racing technology and eight cylinders, more beast than beauty.

Half an hour later he went outside to find that his car -- he describes it as his baby on which he had spent close to $60,000 -- was gone.

At first he thought it had been towed for a parking infraction but a quick check with the pub revealed no one had requested a tow truck, leaving theft as the only explanation for the car's disappearance.

Or was it?

Almost three months later, ICBC has decided that Hernandez can't prove his vehicle was stolen and has denied his insurance claim.

"How am I supposed to prove it was stolen? The only guy who can do that is the thief," Hernandez said.

The dispute seems certain to head into court as Hernandez said he is determined to fight ICBC.

"I'm so offended with what they've done. I'm seeing a lawyer," he said.

"They've let me and every other insured motorist down. I've already been victimized, now they are saying when it comes to the claim I'm on my own," Hernandez fumed.

But the realtor is not alone in having his claim tossed out.

In 2008, about 15 per cent of claims for stolen vehicles were closed without payment, ICBC spokesman Mark Jan Vrem said.

"This could be due to many reasons, some of which are that the vehicle wasn't stolen at all, or it was misplaced and later found, or borrowed and later returned, or towed, or recovered and there were no damages, or the amount of damage was below the deductible," Jan Vrem said.

The Vancouver Sun had contacted Vrem to discuss the issue but was told Hernandez would have to sign a waiver before the corporation would comment on his case.

Hernandez signed a waiver, but then Jan Vrem replied by e-mail that ICBC wouldn't comment.

"We've looked into the case and despite the customer having signed the release form, acting on advice from our legal and privacy departments we are not going to release any details at this time, as we strongly suspect this claim will end up in court," wrote Jan Vrem.

"What I can tell you is the customer does have a previous claims history with ICBC and his theft claim was denied based on the evidence gathered by the adjuster, the claims centre, and our special investigations unit.

"The customer has several options going forward, which are spelled out on our website. If none of those are satisfactory the customer does have the option to launch court action, in which case the evidence will become public. ... At this juncture, it would be prejudicial to reveal details of the results of our investigation," he said.

So what is Hernandez's previous record with ICBC?

When asked, he said he once filed a claim for a broken windshield and that he had a single-vehicle accident in northern B.C. when his car went into a ditch.

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Daimler chief: No recovery until 2012 - New Zealand Herald

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 07:55 AM PST

Daimler AG chief executive Dieter Zetsche says it will take until 2012 or 2013 before the US automotive market recovers to the sales levels seen before the recession-driven decline.

Mr Zetsche, speaking to reporters in New York, also offered a cautious outlook for industry-wide US auto sales in 2010.

"I do believe that next year the US market will see some growth to somewhere between 10 million to 11 million [units]," he said.

The US auto industry has seen sales contract for four straight years.

Sales this year are expected to total just above 10 million cars, crossovers and light trucks, down from 13.1 million in 2008.

The Daimler forecast for 2010 sales is more cautious than other industry forecasts, including those from other major carmakers.

Analyst CSM Worldwide has forecast industry-wide US sales of 11.8 million cars and light trucks for 2010, while J.D. Power is expecting 11.5 million.

Ford Motors is even more bullish. Its projection is for US sales of more than 12 million.

General Motors has said it expects sales of about 11.5 million vehicles in the US next year.

US sales held above 16 million vehicles a year consistently from 1999 to 2005.

- AP

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Seniors suffer in troubled California subdivision - Post-Bulletin

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 07:12 AM PST

By Jacob Adelman

Associated Press

HEMET, Calif. -- John and Donna Pringle were newly widowed when they fell in love and decided to slip into retirement together at a sprawling community being built for the 55-and-up crowd a few miles from their homes in this sun-bleached Southern California town.

The Peppertree subdivision promised an expansive swimming pool where visiting grandchildren could splash and swim, a gym stocked with exercise equipment and hundreds of similarly aged neighbors.

But when Peppertree's builder abandoned the project months after the Pringles moved in, the pool disappeared behind a locked iron gate, the exercise machines were repossessed and the 13 existing residents were left alone to grow testy with each other in their cramped corner of the 85-acre development, looking out at empty, overgrown lots stacked with abandoned metal pipes and roof tiles.

Brown-plumed roadrunners dash over the arid dirt, sometimes with mice in their beaks, and tumbleweeds blow across the wasteland of the development onto residents' lawns.

In Peppertree's earth-tone stucco homes beside a cluster of boulder-studded hills, the recession and the collapse of the Southern California housing industry have crashed head-on into another fragile tenet of the American dream.

"We really feel cheated out of our retirement," said Donna Pringle, 72, as she and her 81-year-old husband sat outside on their porch. Theirs is one of only seven occupied homes in the planned 470-unit subdivision. "We've worked all our lives toward this and it's not what we were promised."

A few dozen additional homes are built but can't be occupied until Peppertree is connected to the regional sewage grid -- something developer William Lo left undone when he relinquished the subdivision in mid-2008 and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.

"It just doesn't feel right," said another resident, John Reider, 65, a retired auto lot manager, as he walked along a buckling road pocked with sinkholes, the apparent result of a faulty drainage system. "It bums me out."

Delores Conway, director of the Casden Forecast at the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate, said Peppertree's residents likely have years to wait before construction resumes, even after the sewers are fixed.

Once banks are more willing to offer construction loans again, she said, builders will first focus on areas closer to the region's employment centers than Hemet, located some 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The quiet location near their previous homes was a selling point for the Pringles when they made a down payment on their $400,000 home in February of 2007, four months before their wedding.

They moved into the three-bedroom, two-story house with a walk-in elevator in September and, over the next few months, watched neighbors trickle in while crews applied stucco and laid down roof tiles on other new homes.

The couple frequented the subdivision's palatial clubhouse, working out on the gym's stationary bikes and treadmills and, when summer came, relaxing beside the pool.

Then things started to change.

The bustling sales staff that operated out of the clubhouse's soaring atrium dwindled to three members, then to just one, then to none at all.

Letters arrived in residents' mailboxes announcing liens on their property for allegedly unpaid construction bills. A worker parked by the subdivision's entrance with "Buyers beware: Builder does not pay contractors" painted on his truck. Repo crews arrived at the clubhouse and left with exercise equipment, furniture and flat-panel TVs.

In May 2008, residents received a letter from Lo explaining that PCG-Peppertree LP, a subsidiary of his development company Pacific Century Homes Inc., couldn't afford to complete or maintain the project and would let Central Pacific Bank take it over.

A few months after Lo's departure, a resident spoke with the driver of a tanker truck and learned he was making weekly visits to Peppertree to empty a septic tank. That's how they learned their homes were not linked to the region's sewage system.

Karl Roland, an Eastern Municipal Water District administrator, said his agency refused to connect Peppertree to the regional grid in 2007 because of shoddy plumbing work, but allowed the city to issue up to 10 certificates of occupancy while the pipes were repaired.

But Lo walked away from the project before that work was completed, leaving most of the homes unmarketable. Water district officials are waiting for the project's insurers to release funds for the repairs, Roland said.

Lawyers for Lo and Central Pacific Bank did not return phone messages.

Residents said their shared adversity has not drawn them together. Tensions have run high since late summer, when a plan to use homeowners' dues to restore the swimming pool fell apart.

Reider said the trouble was getting city inspectors to sign off on the plan, but that others blamed him.

"Ever since then it's been a little bit tense around here," he said.

Reider said his neighbors think he didn't want to spend dues on the pool because he's given up on Peppertree, and he concedes that when the sewer is repaired and the liens cleared he'll sell his home -- even at a significant loss -- and leave the stalled subdivision behind.

The Pringles, however, said that they couldn't afford to sell at a loss and hope to see their hoped-for neighborhood rise around them while they're still able to enjoy it.

"When you're younger, you can kind of sit back and think, 'In 10 years, I'm going to have this or I'm going to have that,"' Donna Pringle said. "We hope we have another 10 years left, but we don't know."

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Man outwaits all others for bargains - Leaf Chronicle

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 06:43 AM PST

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During the first evening, night, morning and afternoon of his adventure, no one else is around, but Watts feels like he cannot leave, so driven is he to be the first in line when Best Buy opens at 5 a.m. today.

His purchase plan, with products and prices remembered with photographic detail, included a Sony Vaio laptop computer ($399), a HP laptop ($197) a desktop computer, iPods, a GPS navigator and a washer and dryer ($488 for the pair) that he planned to use in a rental property.

Shopping psyche

Some Black Friday shoppers are in it for the excitement, others for the sheer shopping adrenaline.

An example is the Brockmans, one of hundreds of local families who make Black Friday shopping a family tradition.

David Brockman said although they rise before dawn to go into the shopping throngs, he and his family aren't in it for the deals. Instead, they people watch, seeing what shoppers are buying and trying to guess whether the purchases are for themselves or are gifts for others.

For Watts, most of his purchases are neither.

Watts works at Advance Auto Parts, where his photographic memory comes in handy and his co-workers are eager to put it to use. Several of them paid him $10 to buy doorbuster deals for them.

While $10 doesn't seem like a very big reward for waiting outside Best Buy for 35 hours, he pointed out that when it's 10 friends' orders, it starts to add up. He explained that he buys his friends' Best Buy requests — thousands of dollars worth — using his store credit card, which earns him rewards dollars to spend in the store.

But the biggest payoff is in reselling new products on eBay, where Watts said he can sometimes get three times the price he paid on Black Friday. If an item is scarce and in demand like the Nintendo Wii was last year, Watts may get four or five times the price he paid.

Black Friday is like the Super Bowl for Watts, the big game after a year of saving a few hundred dollars here or there with end-of-season sale purchases. He likes to buy $50 shirts at Dillard's when they go for $5 on the clearance rack. Thursdays are the best day to look for new markdowns, he says.

"When I go to the store, I always walk down every aisle," Watts says. "Most people don't do that."

Getting shockingly good deals is a way of life for Watts, who got $10 interior doors at Lowe's and $19 vacuum cleaners — several of them — at Home Depot.

"As a friend of mine says, I'm a professional shopper," he said.

Best Buy is Watts' favorite Black Friday starting point because the store gives out paper vouchers for doorbuster items to people lined up at the door. The first person in line — the position Watts waited a day and a half to secure — can have a voucher for each of 20 or so megasale items, meaning there is no rush for the door or scramble to find things. Before the click of the lock happened to open Best Buy's doors at 5 a.m. today, all of the people in line had vouchers in hand, and knew which of their electronics dreams would be realized, and which would be dashed on the cold, dark ground. But for the first person in line, every wish was fulfilled.

"It's a high," Watts said.

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Residents' golden years tarnished by housing bust in Southern ... - Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 05:24 AM PST

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JACOB ADELMAN Associated Press Writer

8:26 a.m. EST, November 27, 2009

HEMET, Calif. (AP) — John and Donna Pringle were newly widowed when they fell in love and decided to slip into retirement together at a sprawling community being built for the 55-and-up crowd a few miles from their homes in this sun-bleached Southern California town.

The Peppertree subdivision promised an expansive swimming pool where visiting grandchildren could splash and swim, a gym stocked with exercise equipment and hundreds of similarly aged neighbors.

But when Peppertree's builder abandoned the project months after the Pringles moved in, the pool disappeared behind a locked iron gate, the exercise machines were repossessed and the 13 existing residents were left alone to grow testy with each other in their cramped corner of the 85-acre development, looking out at empty, overgrown lots stacked with abandoned metal pipes and roof tiles.

Brown-plumed roadrunners dash over the arid dirt, sometimes with mice in their beaks, and tumbleweeds blow across the wasteland of the development onto residents' lawns.

In Peppertree's earth-tone stucco homes beside a cluster of boulder-studded hills, the recession and the collapse of the Southern California housing industry have crashed head-on into another fragile tenet of the American dream.

"We really feel cheated out of our retirement," said Donna Pringle, 72, as she and her 81-year-old husband sat outside on their porch. Theirs is one of only seven occupied homes in the planned 470-unit subdivision. "We've worked all our lives toward this and it's not what we were promised."

A few dozen additional homes are built but can't be occupied until Peppertree is connected to the regional sewage grid — something developer William Lo left undone when he relinquished the subdivision in mid-2008 and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.

"It just doesn't feel right," said another resident, John Reider, 65, a retired auto lot manager, as he walked along a buckling road pocked with sinkholes, the apparent result of a faulty drainage system. "It bums me out."

Delores Conway, director of the Casden Forecast at the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate, said Peppertree's residents likely have years to wait before construction resumes, even after the sewers are fixed.

Once banks are more willing to offer construction loans again, she said, builders will first focus on areas closer to the region's employment centers than Hemet, located some 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The quiet location near their previous homes was a selling point for the Pringles when they made a down payment on their $400,000 home in February of 2007, four months before their wedding.

They moved into the three-bedroom, two-story house with a walk-in elevator in September and, over the next few months, watched neighbors trickle in while crews applied stucco and laid down roof tiles on other new homes.

The couple frequented the subdivision's palatial clubhouse, working out on the gym's stationary bikes and treadmills and, when summer came, relaxing beside the pool.

Then things started to change.

The bustling sales staff that operated out of the clubhouse's soaring atrium dwindled to three members, then to just one, then to none at all.

Letters arrived in residents' mailboxes announcing liens on their property for allegedly unpaid construction bills. A worker parked by the subdivision's entrance with "Buyers beware: Builder does not pay contractors" painted on his truck. Repo crews arrived at the clubhouse and left with exercise equipment, furniture and flat-panel TVs.

In May 2008, residents received a letter from Lo explaining that PCG-Peppertree LP, a subsidiary of his development company Pacific Century Homes Inc., couldn't afford to complete or maintain the project and would let Central Pacific Bank take it over.

A few months after Lo's departure, a resident spoke with the driver of a tanker truck and learned he was making weekly visits to Peppertree to empty a septic tank. That's how they learned their homes were not linked to the region's sewage system.

Karl Roland, an Eastern Municipal Water District administrator, said his agency refused to connect Peppertree to the regional grid in 2007 because of shoddy plumbing work, but allowed the city to issue up to 10 certificates of occupancy while the pipes were repaired.

But Lo walked away from the project before that work was completed, leaving most of the homes unmarketable. Water district officials are waiting for the project's insurers to release funds for the repairs, Roland said.

Lawyers for Lo and Central Pacific Bank did not return phone messages.

Residents said their shared adversity has not drawn them together. Tensions have run high since late summer, when a plan to use homeowners' dues to restore the swimming pool fell apart.

Reider said the trouble was getting city inspectors to sign off on the plan, but that others blamed him.

"Ever since then it's been a little bit tense around here," he said.

Reider said his neighbors think he didn't want to spend dues on the pool because he's given up on Peppertree, and he concedes that when the sewer is repaired and the liens cleared he'll sell his home — even at a significant loss — and leave the stalled subdivision behind.

The Pringles, however, said that they couldn't afford to sell at a loss and hope to see their hoped-for neighborhood rise around them while they're still able to enjoy it.

"When you're younger, you can kind of sit back and think, 'In 10 years, I'm going to have this or I'm going to have that,'" Donna Pringle said. "We hope we have another 10 years left, but we don't know."

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