Not so long ago, condo developers pulled out all the stops for prospective buyers at opening parties.

Even in the middle of a condo meltdown, Miami finds a way to make money on real estate.

Consider the case of attorney, events promoter and cultural scenester Aaron Resnick. A mere day after losing his bid to get Simon Cruz elected mayor of Miami Beach to protect the future of house parties, Resnick and his partners at the Davidoff Law Firm launched a new venture to help ease the morning-after headache of condo-boom speculators.

The venture, started with a Web site called www.recovermydeposit.com, represents the marriage of Resnick’s considerable promotional skills with the recognition of a new boutique legal specialty that’s bound to grow along with buyer’s remorse.

The regret stems from a variety of circumstances afflicting many projects sold a few years ago at fabulous parties well-stocked with free drinks and attractive women. After the festivities ended, cold realities intruded. Construction costs went up, delays mounted, financial conditions changed. Some less-experienced developers, like their buyers, simply overextended themselves. Others have proved, to varying degrees, incompetent or unscrupulous.

While all of that was going on, the market nearly died, spawning lots of secondary markets for condo unit auctions and vulture buyers. For many people who took chances on can’t-miss opportunities circa 2004, the narrowing choices included just simply walking away from their deposits before closing on a potential financial albatross. That decision can be painful whether the condo is worth $7 million or $200,000.

“The experience most people have is one of frustration,” says Resnick. “That it’s taking so long, they’re not getting answers and the only time they hear from the developer is with a letter telling them the day of reckoning is at hand.”

Apparently, Resnick tells me, there are a lot of laws on the books designed to protect new condo buyers, but few know about them. These laws give the buyer some room to cancel a contract, or get a deposit back, or renegotiate the price. Reasons could include if the buyer doesn’t close within two years of signing the contract, or if the developer suckers the buyer with false/misleading promotional materials or makes material changes to what was purchased.

“You would be very surprised how many developers didn’t comply with the requirements and therefore don’t get those protections,” Resnick adds. “This can happen on expensive units like the Apogee to smaller units like the Filling Station Lofts in the Design District.”

Resnick says he started getting the occasional call from unhappy buyers about a year ago. Now he gets four or five calls a day. “With 70,000 condos supposed to come online, if even 10 percent want to get out, that will be enough to keep everyone busy,” he reckons. “By next year, every litigation attorney in town will have a case like this.”

I don’t know where Resnick finds the time to develop a whole new line of business. This year, he started and led Miami Beach Residents to Protect Homeowners Rights, which raised more than $30,000 for ads supporting Cruz because the group was afraid Matti Bower would restrict the use of private houses for commercial parties. Unfortunately for the group, party people don’t vote and non-hip homeowners irritated by noise and parking problems do.

The young attorney is also an owner of Ajax Entertainment, an events promotion business that does chichi events like Social Miami at the Sagamore Hotel. He also is chairman of the Friends of the New World Symphony, a Miami Design Preservation League board member and neck-deep in a bunch of other cultural schmooze fests, such as the Art Crowd of the Bass Museum, and the Green Room Society for the Carnival Center for Performing Arts, among others.

It turns out that some of those culture types got just as caught up in the condo hype as everybody else. Resnick was simply able to see the business potential in his social circle. “There’s a lot of overlap between social, cultural and business,” he admits.

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On the other side of Miami, far from premium waterfront lots, the pump and dump housing crisis also has affected people left out of the boom.

About six weeks ago, the Miami Worker’s Center (MWC) and Legal Services of Greater Miami helped tenants of the Liberty City Apartments complex file suit against their landlords for allowing slum conditions to persist in their buildings. Tony Romano, MWC’s organizing director, said that as the housing crisis has gotten worse, people’s options have disappeared.

“As the bubble bursts, the people hit the hardest are on the bottom who can’t afford to own,” he argues. “Lots of working class and poor folks living in Wynwood, Liberty City, Little Haiti and Overtown are stuck in these buildings. The slumlords know people have nowhere to go, so they extract as much as possible from rents and hold on until they can flip the building.”

In Overtown, the ever-feisty Power U activists won what they consider a small victory in the overall housing battle by securing modest relocation fees for 32 families kicked out of apartments slated to become an office building called Logik Tower (with a second phase of residential condos planned next door).

There were 47 families in two buildings, but by the time Power U jumped in, only 32 families were left. After quite a fight, the group succeeded in getting some money to help residents find new places to live, but Power U leader Denise Perry says most will face a financial crisis in a few months.

“These people were paying $300 to $375 [monthly] rents for years,” she advises. “In the places they moved to, typically they’re paying $200 more. We tried to hook them up with all the programs we could, but unless they get new jobs or pay raises, it will be a repeated crisis potentially.”

Perry says the larger problem is that the city of Miami allowed code violations to persist in the buildings for years and even allowed the new landlords to collect rents without a proper license while they worked on getting approvals for the new office building. Calls to Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones’ office by residents went unanswered, which she claims is evidence of the city’s general disregard for the poor.

“You know, Spence-Jones’ new theme for the district is ‘Wake up Miami. It’s Time to Take Control,’” Perry notes. “I say, ‘Wake up Miami, it’s time for a new commissioner.’”