Will the Real Estate Crash Affect the Watchtower?

by WTWizard 6 Replies latest jw friends

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  WTWizard

  I have heard about all the money that the Watchtower Society stands to make on all its real estate holdings. And that's bad news. With donations going down and lawsuits going up, and the need in Nigeria, they are going to need all the money from the real estate that they can get.

  There is good news to this, though it may come with a price if you are selling a house. Real estate prices in many areas, including New York City, are on the way down. Why? They had a bubble of sub-prime mortgages lately, and many of those are getting hit with spikes in interest rates and payments. This will lead to defaults and foreclosures. Those foreclosures are going to flood the market with real estate, and therefore driving down prices. Hopefully the Watchtower Society is hit very hard by this.

  I would like to hear them taking a bath for $60 million because of a slow sale of a $80 million property. Hopefully some of their profits will be eaten by a nice bear market in their assets. Hopefully this will happen at the same time they are hit with all the lawsuits, and that it will force them to delay even more on selling the property and giving it time to go down even more. That will force them to push back plans to invade Nigeria (where they have more than 450,000 Bible studies and a higher probability per study of getting a new publisher) or China (where they could easily get another 3 or 4 million drones). At this point, we apostates strike. Hopefully www.sixscreensofthewatchtower.com has enough servers to deal with the hit that it should make on that site.
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  MidwichCuckoo

  Reading of the Watchtower's 'storing up treasures on Earth' makes me angry. I always believed, as a youngster, that the Watchtower had no interest in temporary Earthly treasures - unlike the Conventional Churches, which the WTBTS contantly criticised for their wealth.

  I now believe that the WTBTS is nothing more than a corrupt business, conning not only Society (into thinking It'sa Religion), but It's own members.

  What's that Scripture?..the one about LOVE of money being the root of all evil?
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  MidwichCuckoo

  Oh - and hello WTWizard - I see where you're coming from on the property thing. Wishful thinking. Hopefully their greed will expose them.
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  XBEHERE

  Doesn't really matter since they will essentially be a "paper" loss since WT bought many of those properties either dirt cheap in the 70's and 80's or back on the early 1900's. Note excerpt from NYPost Article:

  "That year, they sold their former book plant at 360 Furman St. for $205 million - more than 50 times the $3.9 million they paid for the 14-story building in 1983, according to records"

  So even the Real Estate market is going down it will never dip below what they unitially paid for the prime real estate. Besides Brooklyn Hts is a VERY desireable area to live in so I doubt it would drop that low.
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  WTWizard

  S***. I was hoping for them to take a bath on some of their real estate holdings. That would be on top of the bath that they will hopefully take soon on those lawsuits and another bath on losing members and their donations, just when Nigeria needs the funds the most.
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  MidwichCuckoo

  Nigeria needs funds? Well, It's in the wrong 'charity' then. If the WTBTS made millions of pounds/dollars - do you really think It would spend it making their 'brothers' ' lives comfortable during these Last Days? I've never heard of the WT helping even Its own. Yet I have heard stories of 'brothers' in poor countries trekking 5 miles across crocodile infested waters to listen to WT propoganda....sadly.
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  RubaDub

  Real Estate Crash ???

  I'm not sure where you are getting this information but since 2000, real estate prices have more then doubled and even tripled in many areas. Prices on larger and more expensive homes and buildings have risen even more dramatically due to the lower interest rates.

  If you say that prices may have leveled off or even dropped a few percent in the past year, that is certainly true overall in this country.

  But in areas such as New York City and where I live in South Florida, there is nowhere else to build and prices of existing property just continure to rise.

  These properties were purchased by the Society many years ago and are worth 3, 4, 5 or even 10 times more than their original purchase price.

  Actually, selling off those properties and moving to less expensive areas is not being done just by the Society but many large corporations that want to reduce their operating costs.

  Rub a Dub