Five Questions: Peter Zalewski

Five years ago, Peter Zalewski was working as a business journalist, but he jumped into real estate before the condo crisis hit and founded Condo Vultures. His provacatively named real estate firm has grown by leaps and bounds, helping buyers to sift through the foreclosure stats and find steals in South Florida’s real estate collapse. Last year, he also appeared in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story . He answered five questions for Under the Sun. How many times have you been asked: have we hit the bottom yet? And have we hit the bottom yet? We get asked about the bottom as much as a TV weathercaster gets asked out the weekend outlook. Back in 2006, everyone wanted to know why we thought the South Florida market would tumble. In 2007 and 2008, everyone used to ask how much more the prices were going to fall. In 2009, we were always asked if the market was stabilizing. In 2010, the question that we are getting repeatedly is, how long before the prices start to go up? I think the