The fast-paced housing market leaves buyers in a race to beat other bidders to the door
By MICHAEL POLLICK
michael.pollick@heraldtribune.comPlaying the home-buying game in Southwest Florida can be like stepping onto a moving train.Just ask Kelly McWilliams.The newlywed and her husband, Dennis, showed up in North Port in November, ready to take a new-home deal that they had found six months earlier after just arriving from Long Island. The builder would sell them a lot, then build a home on it, all for $187,000."We came back, were almost ready to do a contract, and the price had jumped almost 50 grand. Things just boomed completely down there. We kind of found ourselves at a loss," Kelly McWilliams said.That's when they got really serious about buying. While renting and getting established in their new Sarasota jobs, they started going to open houses almost every weekend, looking at 80 homes from one end of Southwest Florida to the other.In early May, when Kelly Williams arrived at the clean, well- kept, three-bedroom, two-bath house off Bee Ridge Road, she knew before she had even gone through the whole house that she wanted to buy it."We saw it on a Sunday night. We put a bid in that night at 9 o'clock at night," she said.As first-time home buyers in the heady regional market for existing homes, the McWilliamses were pitting themselves against some real pros who have descended on Southwest Florida, a cool place with hot prices.It's a market where the only sign of ebbing so far has been that the April median sales price for existing homes was $304,300 instead of $305,400 the previous month. It was $246,500 the previous April.All conspiringNick Figlow tries to keep an ear to the ground constantly on what's fueling the boom.It is not one factor, but a number of them, all conspiring at once to keep the inventory of available houses low, the demand high and people like the McWilliamses crazy, says Figlow, the president of Re/Max Gulfstream Realty, with 75 agents.He unabashedly describes the current market as "frantic," and he doesn't mean just for the client."Every agent in the company has buyers. There's just nothing to sell them," he laments.It's important to remember that Florida's real estate boom is part of a bigger boom, Figlow notes. So part of the Sunshine State's action is a spinoff of the lofty real estate prices in places with colder climates.Figlow, who hails from Batavia, N.Y., said it's not unusual to find a homeowner upstate who paid $30,000 for a home umpteen years ago that is now worth in excess of $300,000."In your mind, you just won the lottery for an extra 300 grand. You're coming to Florida. To you, that extra $300,000 is like free money."In addition to the baby boomers, whose ages range from 55 to 64, the Florida market is also trying to absorb some buying from their children, who are in their 20s and 30s.David and Jodi Smith, both 33, live in Columbus, Ohio, but have serious designs on Sarasota.They just committed themselves to spending $637,000 for a house in a gated community within Palmer Ranch, even though they won't be able to live there full time until five years from now.Then you have the bubble-riders -- here precisely because the price appreciation is so fast.Nobody knows how long it will last. But even at 20 percent a year -- forget 24 percent -- a house that's worth $250,000 today would be worth a mouth- watering $432,000 in just four years.Living in the bubble Christine Tiffin and her husband, Bruce, transplanted Canadians, have been making a living within that bubble for the past two years.Every night, with near-religious fervor, Christine Tiffin scours the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, on the Internet, looking for deals.She buys houses that seem like they could benefit from cosmetic work, fixes them up and then plops them back on the market at new, higher prices.She has given up on loyalty to any one real estate agent, instead preferring to work with whomever the listing agent is."The listing agent works very hard to close a deal because he's getting a commission from both ends," Christine Tiffin said.So a few weekends ago, Tiffin spots this fresh MLS listing for a close-in home at 2545 Aspinwall St. The price was $248,900 for a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a caged pool, a block or two north of Fruitville Road and near Shade Avenue.The listing agent, as it happens, isn't from the United States either. It's Jean-Jacques Barilleau, a Parisian who tried a restaurant in Sarasota in the mid-'90s, then drifted into real estate. Working with Prudential Palms Realty, he is a lot like his client in this case: living and breathing real estate."I do everything right away," Barilleau says. "You can call me at 9 o'clock at night, and we can be looking at the property the next morning."So Tiffin calls Barilleau on a Sunday night. Even though the listed house is by a tenant, Barilleau manages to get the Tiffins in the door by Monday at midday. By 5 p.m., the deal is done, with the seller accepting the Tiffins' full-price offer."We make our decisions very quickly," Christine Tiffin says.The house on Aspinwall Street, which could easily have sat on the market for a few months in years gone by, is history in four days flat. Christine Tiffin figures they will hold onto it for a year.For houses priced to sell, the pace for buyers is very quick.Sheila Carothers, half of the husband-wife team that owns Assist2Sell of Sarasota, captures the spirit of the times.In years gone by, she says, you'd go over a buyer's preferences, make up a list of houses that fit the bill in some way, and then show them all in a row on a given day.In 2005, you can forget all about that approach."The minute one comes out, you go out and show that one house. You want to be the first person to tell them about that house."The Smiths, who run their own construction business in Ohio, already owned a home and a condominium in Sarasota when they decided to buy more of a dream home in Sarasota's Deer Park in May.Jodi Smith's mother is living in the condo, and the Smiths themselves hang out at their home at Colony Grove in southeast Sarasota when they escape from Ohio."Our goal is to be here in the next five years, permanently," Jodi Smith says. "I don't want to wait until I'm 80 to enjoy Siesta Key and Florida."The Deer Park house, within an elaborately landscaped gated community, was listed for the whopping $637,000 and sold in one day flat, before the Smiths could even get a viewing.A few days later, when the buyer's loan deal fell through, the Smiths swooped in with a full price offer of their own, using Dan Shanahan of Help-U- Sell to formulate their pitch."We knew there wouldn't be any negotiating," Jodi Smith says.Meanwhile, even though the McWilliamses, the first-time buyers from Long Island, couldn't slip into Sarasota for under $200,000, they feel like they still made a good geographic trade at $215,000, with two new jobs to pay the mortgage."This house in New York would have been $350,000, easy," Kelly McWilliams says. "Long Island has been out of control longer than Sarasota."
Article from the Sarasota Herald Tribune:
http://www.sarasotaherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050529/BUSINESS/505290338
