SRQ Realtor

Southwest Florida could net a healthy number of visitors this winter, but the local competition for their business is fierce.

People who manage hotels and condos are starting to realize that visitors have many, many options.

After three years of raising rates, they are now focused on making sure guests return.

David Teitelbaum, president of a small condo-hotel resort on Anna Maria Island, said that’s what drove him to make a rare move: He lowered winter season rates.

“If we didn’t have such a high repeat and referral business, we’d be sticking the rate as high as we could,” Teitelbaum said. “We want them to have a good Tortuga experience,” he said, referring to the 55-unit hotel in Bradenton Beach. Read the rest of this entry »

The commercial real estate markets continue to grow with record investment, and individual sectors in many areas are seeing tighter vacancy rates and higher rents, according to the latest Commercial Real Estate Outlook from National Association of Realtors® (NAR).

“The office and industrial markets continue to shine, supported by job growth and trade, while the rental apartment sector is seeing healthy rent increases,” says David Lereah, NAR’s chief economist. “The retail sector is essentially flat, but the hotel industry is doing better than at any time since 2001.”  

James Marrelli, NAR vice president of commercial real estate, notes there is a record flow of capital into commercial real estate. “Institutional investors, pension funds and foreign investors have focused on commercial-grade properties to diversify portfolio assets, with expectations of solid long-term gains.”

Outside of the hotel sector, more than $236 billion in commercial real estate transaction volume was recorded in the first 10 months of 2006, up from $231.9 billion in the same period of 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

What homeowner wouldn’t be ecstatic over a 25 percent cut in the property insurance bill?

Probably the one whose premium just jumped by 200 percent.

State lawmakers will consider proposals next week that could roll back property insurance rates from 25 percent to 40 percent.

At The Inlets in Venice, where the condominium association’s windstorm insurance increases this month from $75,000 to $206,000, such a reduction would be welcome but “no big deal,” said association president Elmer Day.

“It’s not going to be a barn burner, but anything is helpful,” he said.

Homeowners, condo residents and business owners have been hit with crushing rate hikes in the past two years. Read the rest of this entry »

Sarasota-Bradenton posted a pricing decline — 9 percent — to $291,500, though the area’s median has been trending up when compared with the last several months.

The varying pitch of pricing in the region makes perfect sense to David Lipstein, founder of Manasota Key Realty.

“Buyers are looking for bargains — there’s no question about it,” Lipstein said. “They are making offers that are much lower than list prices. In the past, sellers would have been insulted by such low offers and would not have responded, but now most of them want to be insulted. At least that gives them a starting point for negotiations.”

But what a difference 60 miles make. Read the rest of this entry »

A new housing community is going up in North Englewood. Beechwood Builders will build Heritage Creek, a single-family community to be located off State Road 776 in Englewood, a half-mile south of Manasota Beach Road.

Beechwood Builders is a custom home and remodeling builder and has been in business for more than 15 years in the Sarasota County area, according to Roger Greig of Beechwood Realty. The price of a new home will start in the low $500,000 range. The homes will be built in the Key West-style, with 2,200-2,300 square feet of living space under air, he said.

“We’re going to promote it as ‘your house, your way, your price,’” Greig said. “They’re going to be fully custom homes and they’re going to be priced with all the crown molding, all the extras — even towel warmers in the bathrooms,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Officials from Four Seasons, which hopes to open as many as eight new properties annually, according to its Web site, did not return a telephone call for comment.

If Four Seasons does commit, it would mark the second time the Toronto-based hotelier has considered Sarasota.

A decade ago, when plans to develop a Ritz-Carlton were jelling on an 11-acre tract on U.S. 41 at First Street, Four Seasons scouted the area and met with local economic development officials.

Kathy Baylis, president of the Economic Development Corp. of Sarasota County, said the company sought demographic and other material. Four Seasons has not contacted her of late, she said.

To make the project more palatable to Four Seasons, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts or InterContinental Hotels, Moyer said Lion’s Gate also has signed a contract to buy a site on Lido Beach, near the Ritz-Carlton’s $30 million Beach Club. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of the health care workers, police and teachers that communities rely on for vital services can’t afford to buy homes, and some even have trouble covering rental costs, a new study found.

The Center for Housing Policy, the research affiliate of the National Housing Conference in Washington, D.C., found that a working family needed an annual income of $84,957 to qualify to purchase a home valued at $248,000, the median price nationally in the third quarter of last year.

Yet the median salaries of many workers were below that, the study found.

It said, for example, that registered nurses earned an average of $58,640 last year; elementary school teachers, $47,104; police officers, $45,780; licensed practical nurses, $37,127; retail sales people, $24,597; and janitors, $23,724.

The study, released Wednesday, looked at workers in 60 different occupations in some 210 communities. On the rental side, it said, nursing aides couldn’t afford to rent a typical one-bedroom home in 80 of the metro areas or a typical two-bedroom home in 147 of the areas. For retail sales persons, the typical one-bedroom home was unaffordable in 78 of the metro areas, and the typical two-bedroom home was unaffordable in 162 of the metro areas studied, it said. Barbara Lipman, research director at the center, said the study suggests that communities should be worried about attracting and retaining good workers. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine a Florida with twice as many people, double the congestion and another seven million acres of farms, forests and other rural lands paved over or converted into sprawling towns and suburbs. That’s the “frightening” future Florida will face by 2060 – just 53 years away – unless the state makes dramatic changes soon in its approach to growth management, leaders of the environmental group 1000 Friends of Florida said Wednesday as they released a pair of studies on the issue.

Existing requirements for local 10-year comprehensive plans are inadequate to deal with the long-term statewide implications of rampant growth, said 1000 Friends vice president Tim Jackson. “The governor and Legislature should say ‘Here’s where we’re really trying to go in 100 years,”’ Jackson said. “‘What are the lands we ought to protect? What’s the form and character of communities that we ought to protect and preserve, and what form and where do we want new growth to happen?”’

The studies were commissioned in partnership with The St. Joe Co., Florida’s largest private land owner and one of the state’s biggest developers; A. Duda and Sons, a major agribusiness, and The Nature Conservancy, another environmental group. “The 1000 Friends of Florida 2060 population scenario is a useful look into what the future could be if we don’t take planning and plan implementation seriously,” said state Department of Community Affairs spokeswoman Alexis Antonacci. But she added, “There are many factors working to change those trends.” Read the rest of this entry »

Expect to see foreclosures on subprime or nontraditional loans – mortgages made to consumers with impaired credit – to accelerate, according to the Center for Responsible Lending (CNL) (http://www.responsiblelending.org), a nonprofit research organization.

A recent CDL report, which analyzed more than 6 million subprime mortgages made from 1998 through the third quarter of 2006, estimates that 2.2 million households in the subprime market have either lost their homes to foreclosure or hold mortgages that will fail this year. The cost to homeowners could be as high as $164 billion, primarily from lost home equity.

Even during years of strong appreciation, as many as one in eight subprime loans ended in foreclosure within five years of origination, according to CDL. Read the rest of this entry »

At 64, and looking toward his retirement next year, Willie Lee Howard agreed to refinance his duplex in Northeast Washington, thinking that a fixed-rate loan would help stabilize his finances.

What Howard got instead was a mortgage he did not understand. Baffled by the loan documents he was mailed after the closing, he consulted an AARP lawyer and learned that he now had an interest-only loan, a new and controversial kind of mortgage. Howard was told that under its terms, his mortgage balance will rise instead of fall and that he will need to refinance in 10 years, when he may be too old to work.

“This is a bunch of junk they done to me,” said Howard, a construction worker.

Howard’s chagrin at his mortgage’s complex provisions illustrates the confusion felt by many borrowers struggling to adapt to a radically transformed home lending market. Read the rest of this entry »

Changing directions is part of Sarasota’s problem

Some Sarasota city commissioners leave us scratching our heads — such as two months ago, when they rejected parking meters as too inhospitable, then requested higher parking fines instead.

News flash: Joe Tourist doesn’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling about downtown Sarasota when he’s greeted with a big parking fine on his windshield.

Tuesday’s vote, which reversed the commission’s 3-2 conceptual approval last month of a metering pilot project, demonstrated one reason why parking solutions have eluded Sarasota for so long. Leaders can’t seem to steer a clear course.

The board’s action also discarded much of the advice the city paid for as it attempts to address perceived parking shortages. Read the rest of this entry »

No longer as much of a bargain as they were before the Federal Reserve raised short-term rates, adjustable mortgages lost some of their share of the residential market in 2006.

At the end of December, the market share for ARMs fell to 20.4 percent, the lowest since July 2003, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. ARMs’ share of the market has been as high as 33 percent (in 2004) and as low as 11 percent (in 1998).

Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist of Freddie Mac, which buys residential mortgages and repackages them for the secondary market, said Fed action in the first half of 2006 had increased short-term rates by 1 percentage point, to 5.25.

The resulting increase in short-term mortgage rates – first-year ARMs rose 0.3 percent – narrowed the gap with fixed-rate instruments, making adjustables less of a bargain. First-year ARM rates would have risen more had lenders not increased the use of discounts.

To boost the financial incentive for borrowers to choose an ARM, lenders typically offer a lower initial interest rate than what the fully adjusted rate would be at the time of origination – meaning the underlying index rate plus the margin.
At the end of 2005, this discount averaged 1.9 percentage points for conventional, conforming one-year Treasury-indexed ARMs. And by the end of 2006, it had reached an average of 2.3 percentage points.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the number of homes available for sale goes up, it’s no surprise that more homes are vacant - more than 30 percent during the third quarter of 2006 compared to a year earlier or 1.9 million homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau shows. That’s about half of all single-family homes on the market, says Michael Carliner, vice president of economics for NAHB. Sellers facing this dilemma are dropping prices in an attempt to encourage sales. ‘’If buyers are waiting longer, then an increasing number of homes become vacant, which means sellers become desperate and prices fall further. That’s where we are in the cycle,'’ says Anirban Basu, an economist who is chairman and chief executive of Sage Policy Group Inc. in Baltimore. Declining home prices could trigger more defaults on mortgage loans if homeowners struggling with two mortgages cannot cover the cost of the loan by selling the house, adds Celia Chen, director of housing economics for Moody’s Economy.com.

Source: The Baltimore Sun, Lorraine Mirabella (01/21/07)
© Copyright 2007 INFORMATION, INC. Bethesda, MD

STAFF REPORT
Occupancy rates in Sarasota, Bradenton and Venice apartment complexes dropped nearly 5 percent during the past year and could be an indication that average rents won’t rise much in the months ahead, according to data released Thursday.

The local increase in apartment vacancies reflects a similar trend in every metropolitan area tracked by RealFacts, a Novato, Calif.-based firm that compiles data for the multi-family rental industry.

It’s most likely “a (consumer) reaction to rent increases that started earlier in the year,” RealFacts reported. “Such widespread declines in occupancy likely herald reductions in rent growth rates.”

Between late 2005 and late 2006, the average rent in surveyed Sarasota-Manatee apartment complexes reached $928, an increase of 4.2 percent. Meanwhile, those complexes saw their occupancy rates drop from 97 percent to 92.3 percent.

RealFacts surveys more than 12,000 rental complexes, all with 100 or more apartments, in 15 states. In Sarasota and Manatee counties, it surveys 26 properties with a total of 7,627 apartments, ranging from studios to three-bedroom, two-bath units.
Last modified: January 19. 2007 5:16AM

With the number of homes on the market more than double what they were last year and prices leveling out, many investors are searching for new properties.

“We’re looking north and south,” said Roselyn Britton, an investor who owns several properties in Sarasota.

A combination of low mortgage rates and more reasonable home prices has Britton looking. Even though she has experience as an investor, she said the learning process is a continual one. Read the rest of this entry »