I’ve been told similar stories by real estate brokers in NYC.
Students in university cold calling brokers, looking to buy the “most expensive condo” in an agent’s book, sight unseen, and willing to pay in cash or wire transfer.
As a broker, it must be very hard to ignore those incentives. The commission on just one of those sales must be incredible.
Totally OT: apologies but gen220 you don't have contact info in your profile.
You mentioned in an old thread a few months back about using pandoc for versioned documentation in your organisation. I'm looking at doing that now -- converting to markdown, putting files in git. What we really want to do is allow users to comment their copies and the comments be kept across versions. I wondered if you had ideas on that. Currently we use PDF but Acrobat pins comments to page numbers and so they can be completely in the wrong place of pages are removed. We're using manuals that are 1000+ pages.
(Un-)fortunately, we started in a place where we already had plaintext-ish documentation (we never started with PDFs), so we were converting text to PDFs, not the other way around.
People edit the files in markdown and "publish" them in pdfs.
Generally, we do comments in a combination of google docs views of the PDFs (not-preferred, because they die with the document version) and our code review system (preferred, because they live forever, but unfortunately exclusive to engineers).
I actually don't know to what extent pandoc supports the conversion of existing PDFs with comments to markdown, but that sounds like a really hard problem!
The way I'd move from your situation to mine, is to say "no more comments in pdfs", convert the manuals to plaintext at once, make a comment-less PR of the plaintext manual to the repo, and then hack the comments in as comments on the PR, in a way that depends on your code revision tool.
This might be very hard depending on your CR tool.
Let me know if you have any more specific questions, though, I'm happy to help.
This is now the 4th comment of yours I've come across in this thread, all offering no evidence of what you claim. Rather than just repeating "you're wrong" over and over again, you'll get a lot farther by clearly explaining why the article is wrong, once.
Straw buyers who are entirely price insensitive may exist, but are so rare as to be unicorns.
If you are actually “laundering” money, ie from a crime other than fleeing oppression, the cost of laundering matters. Buying a $1M condo for $2M costs you a 50% of your ill gotten gains, and there is still risk of seizure.
At those costs there are far cheaper routes for laundering your money.
So what’s occasionally happening is that Chinese trying to escape the control of the PRC dictatorship send money to a trusted expatriate, sometimes a student, and tell them to pay up to $X for a property at market prices. Naturally this can lead to paying slightly over market because the proxy isn’t motivated to negotiate, or often equipped to.
If I price my home at $1M when it’s worth $950k, they’ll pay the $1M. But they aren’t offering me $1.4M. And it’s questionable what the specific market price really is at any moment.
My friend recently bought a home for $605k that was listed at $599k. He got an early preview the day before it’s initial open house. That night He made a full cash offer at $6k over ask that expired the moment the open house started. The buyer accepted 15 minutes before expiration.
Did he overpay? The buyers received over a half dozen backup offers during the open house, some as high as $30k over ask.
FWIW, the pre-sale buy side of the real estate is not transparent.
These kinds of people usually do not normally get past the KYC stage required by NYC for large real estate sales, and therefore do not end up recorded in the public record.
By definition, the only data that you can reasonably expect to exist about this phenomenon is "anecdata".
I make no statements about the frequency of this phenomenon. I have no reason to believe that such tales are common. However, given the preponderance of stories on the topic, it's hard for me to believe that it never happens.
This all being said, there are worse money laundering and real estate crimes out there. This is just a particularly amusing one.
Students in university cold calling brokers, looking to buy the “most expensive condo” in an agent’s book, sight unseen, and willing to pay in cash or wire transfer.
As a broker, it must be very hard to ignore those incentives. The commission on just one of those sales must be incredible.