Archinect - News

Burj Al Babas, the city of empty castles

2019-01-12T18:42:00-05:00

Deep in a provincial region of northwestern Turkey, it looks like a mirage -- hundreds of luxury houses built in neat rows, their pointed towers somewhere between French chateau and Disney castle. Meant to provide luxurious accommodations for foreign buyers, the houses are however standing empty in what is anything but a fairytale for their investors.

A city of castles has sprung up in Northwestern Turkey. Burj Al Babas, the 732-home and shopping center development built by the Sarot Group, cost a whopping $205 million and may not be inhabited in the foreseeable future. In recent years, the country's high inflation and currency crisis have negatively impacted its housing market. While investors felt secure investing in developments like Burj Al Babas only a few short years ago, the current economic climate is now given an image in the eerily empty development of Burj Al Babas.

Is Vancouver's 15% tax on overseas buyers helping to cool the housing market?

2016-10-12T14:22:00-04:00

There is a city which is suffering a worse property bubble than Sydney, whose residents are more priced-out than Londoners, and where there is a greater divide between the housing haves and have-nots than even San Francisco. That city is Vancouver, and in response to these mounting challenges, the west-coast Canadian metropolis recently imposed an extraordinary new tax on foreign buyers – whose impact is now being watched closely by other cities grappling with bloated property markets.

The era of aspirational pricing is over

2016-07-11T01:39:00-04:00

Brokers say the very top of the market — consisting of eight- and nine-figure homes — is faring the worst as slowing economies overseas and volatile stock markets have spooked buyers. The supply of homes for the rich exploded as builders aimed at the high end after the financial crisis.

Robert Frank highlights a worrisome pileup in the overinflated; luxury housing, megamansions and penthouse market.

Let them eat McMansions! The 1 percent, income inequality, and new-fashioned American excess

2014-04-16T13:35:00-04:00

Today we call those changes “inequality,” and inequality is, obviously, the point of the McMansion. The suburban ideal of the 1950s, according to “The Organization Man,” was supposed to be “classlessness,” but the opposite ideal is the brick-to-the-head message of the dominant suburban form of today.