Kauai Real Estate and Local News Update October 18
CoCo Palms Tour
 Our group enters the back entrance to the dining area. (My husband in the foreground) |
CoCo Palms has been closed since Hurricane Iniki hit the island September 11 1992. Since that time it’s been under 5 different owners with some of the owners taking a run at reopening the resort and all plans have been met with heavy opposition and much public controversy.
The current owners of the property are under an obligation to open the resort up to the local residents and so they have contracted a local Movie Tour company to conduct tours which are limited to certain areas. On this tour we got to see some of the grounds which included “Bungalow #3″ where Elvis always stayed and Bungalow #1 where scenes for Blue Hawaii were filmed. Next we were entertained in the dining area by Larry Rivera with songs and a little of the history that he had there during his 50 plus years at the resort. The last stop was the lobby area which is totally demolished, it felt like we were revisiting the Titanic. I got an answer to the question that I’ve always wondered; have there been problems with squatters in the abandoned resort? The answer was no. Additionally, I was told, there has been very little vandalism done to the property and I saw that to be true.
The future of the resort remains uncertain. Local opposition remains high towards development plans that have been proposed and with the current state of the economy taking on the renovation of the resort to open it back up as a hotel with the current footprint is risky and economically rough. What remains is very clear; this resort has a very special history and the love for CoCo Palms runs deep among the residents of Kauai. It was heartbreaking to me to see such a place rich with history and built up over it’s 50 plus year history with love and devotion to be left vacant and falling further apart as these last 17 years have passed.
Kauai Electric Company Going Green
Kauai’s electric utility has committed to buying renewable energy from a biomass plant planned for West Kauai. Kauai Island Utility Cooperative said this week that it has signed an agreement with Vancouver, Wash.-based Pacific West Energy to buy electricity from its proposed waste-to-energy power plant. While the plant is expected to be online by next year, developers of the $135 million project, which also will produce 15 million gallons of sugar ethanol, still need to secure financing and land. Pacific West Energy said it wants to lease between 12,000 and 15,000 acres of land to grow either sugar or fast-growing wood to fuel the biomass operation. Meanwhile, it is still working on a deal to lease Gay & Robinson’s sugar mill in Kaumakani to build an ethanol plant. Gay & Robinson is harvesting its last crop of sugar cane this month.
Foreclosure Update
Lenders recovered almost 60 percent of the loan value for properties that were foreclosed in 2009. That translated to a recovery of $1.9 billion on 145 defaulted commercial mortgages totaling $3.2 billion.
How much a lender was able to recover in a foreclosure depended on location, type of asset and, most of all, the purpose of the loan. The best recovery rates occurred in the West and Northwest, where rates for acquisition and refinancing loans were 76 percent and 78 percent respectively. The Los Angeles metro area comes in at 70-plus percent recovery rate. Detroit and Tampa are at the bottom with a recovery rate of 45 percent. Hawaii is 65 percent recovery rate.
How did we do last week here on Kauai? Pretty good for sales, we had another week of a good number of closed transactions and this week I saw a lot of properties going contingent. For a complete list of what came on the market and what sold here in Kauai island wide click on this link…. sales oct. 18.