Rio's property bubble bursts with buildings vacant and rents down

Rio de Janeiro

AT opposite ends of downtown Rio de Janeiro, projects tied to Donald Trump and Eike Batista - one a billionaire-turned-politician, the other Brazil's most famous ex-billionaire - have come to represent the city's real estate bust.

The 23-storey Serrador building, a granite-and-glass art deco tower near Rio's Santos Dumont airport, has sat empty since Mr Batista's failed empire of commodities companies abandoned it last year. Four miles away, in the city's gritty port district, an ambitious office project that Mr Trump lent his name to is still nothing more than a weed-filled lot about a year after construction was slated to begin.

While real estate markets are faltering all across this recession-plagued country, nowhere is the toll from a sweeping national corruption scandal and commodities collapse more apparent than in Rio. To make matters worse, a flood of new units that were planned during the boom years of the past decade are now hitting the market, pushing Rio's vacancies to the highest in Latin America. Rents that were …