Condo termination

Paramount unit owners face December selling deadline

forces owners to sell their homes to make way for apartments, angering some.

Jonathan Barr thought living at the Paramount on Lake Eola would be a dream come true.

He estimates spending about $200,000 in custom cabinets, lighting, flooring and other treatments for the downtown Orlando home he bought in 2006. But this past July, Barr was forced to sell because a majority owner is converting the entire building into apartments.

“I realize now, some idiots sat in a board room and decided to take my home. That’s really what happened,” Barr said.

Such a move, called a condo termination, has prompted a lot of anger since it became permissible in 2007 under a Florida law that has been tweaked several times in an effort to make it more fair.

About 50 other unit owners at the 313-unit Paramount are in the same situation, with a mid-December deadline for selling. Several owners the Sentinel talked to said they weren’t necessarily happy about it, but the termination made the best of a tough situation.

With rents in Orlando rising 5 percent a year, apartment units are in high demand. Northland bought the apartment portion of the Paramount in May for $65.2 million, including an area leased by Publix and other stores.

Before 2007, every single condo owner in a building had to agree to termination before it could be converted into an apartment. The law changed during the collapse of the housing market so only 80 percent of unit owners were needed to start the termination. If 10 percent of the unit owners formally voted against the termination, it would be blocked.

The law was tweaked in 2015 and again in early 2017. The most recent change says only 5 percent of unit owners can block a termination, but that doesn’t apply to most condo buildings because it isn’t retroactive in the vast majority of cases, said Jeffrey Margolis, a real estate attorney with Berger Singerman in Fort Lauderdale.

Things could have been worse for Barr. Because he lived in the unit, he was guaranteed to receive at least what