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Archive for the 'real estate' Category

Tampa Bay ranks last when it comes to public transit

Tampa Bay scores again; Forbes Magazine took a look at the 60 major metro areas in the country and then rated their rapid transit systems. Tampa Bay made the list — in last place.

That should come as only a mild surprise to anyone who has had to drive to work on either side of Tampa Bay. Traffic here is a nightmare, and there are few alternatives to driving your own car to work. We do have a bus system, but there is no rapid transit system, no subway, no passenger rail.

A great light rail system opened a few months ago in Phoenix. So far, it's been very popular with local residents.

Many of our major roadways started life as sleepy two-lanes.  US19N, the major north-south road that runs the length of Pinellas County, was once a rural two-lane road that passed through miles of orange groves, at least in the northern part of the county where I live. Someone recently told me that he remembered when there was just a flashing light at the intersection of 19 and Tampa Road, a busy major intersection today that serves six lanes of US19 and four of Tampa Road. 

If you want to cross the bay between Pinellas (Where St. Petersburg is located) and Hillsborough (Tampa), you have four choices: The Gandy bridge; the Howard Franklin Bridge; the Courtney Campbell Causeway; and Hillsborough Avenue, the only land route, located at the northern tip of Tampa Bay. If you attempt this crossing in rush hour, be prepared to sit.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know I am a fan of light rail, and we might — just might — have such a system in our sights.

A month or two ago, President Obama came to town and announced that the federal government would fund the majority share of a high-speed rail line between Tampa Bay and Orlando. That’s nice, because it would eliminate the drive on I-4, a really difficult bit of Interstate between those two cities.

But the real value of such a line would be the possibility of a light rail system at this end of it. The high-speed line could connect to a light-rail system that would circumnavigate Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties and provide an alternative to the automobile.

We have something called the Tampa Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority (TBARTA), which would like to build that system. Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard, who serves on the TBARTA board, spoke at St. Petersburg College recently about rapid transit in Tampa Bay, and said such a system is necessary both for current residents and to respond to companies that may consider locating facilities in Tampa Bay. 

All that said, I do have a bone or two to pick with Forbes about this ranking.  We used to live in Washington, DC,  and it would be hard to imagine a worse commuting city than that. before we lived in Florida we lived in Maine, and that meant the occasional drive to the biggest metro center in that neck of the woods, Boston. If you’ve never driven in Boston at rush hour, it is a breathtaking experience. Still, both those cities have good subway systems and buses that run frequently.

I think it is fair to say that Palm Harbor real estate, Dunedin real estate, or Pinellas County real estate in general would be more attractive if it was served by an efficient light rail system

Colorful murals adorn New Port Richey real estate

If you’ve spent any time at all on this blog, you know that I like murals.  There’s quite a few of them to be found throughout Tampa Bay, and especially in the various communities of Pinellas County. I’ve written about them before.

Dancers in the Hacienda Hotel in the 1920s, as depicted by mural artist Chad Leininger

Today, I found several of them in an unexpected place.

I live and work in North Pinellas County, and that’s where I do most of my real estate work — Palm Harbor real estate, Tarpon Springs real estate, Dunedin real estate, Clearwater real estate. I also list and sell Pasco County real estate, but I spend less time there than in North Pinellas County.

This morning, however, I had to go north to New Port Richey in Pasco County to look over a house that I may be listing for sale.  After that, I drove a few blocks to downtown New Port Richey, a place I haven’t visited for awhile.

Wha surprise — it was a treasure trove of murals.

One of them featured the Hacienda Hotel, a 1920s-era hotel that was very popular in its day but which has not served any guests for more than the past decade. I need to do a little research on the Hacienda, and when I do I’ll post a story. I like old hotels almost as much as I like murals.

This particular mural was painted on a side exterior wall of Juan’s Black Bean Cafe by a young artist named Chad Leininger. According to an old newspaper article, there are a total of six murals painted on various walls in downtown New Port Richey.

Most of the characters in the mural are local folk. But the artist included himself and some of his family members as well as actress Greta Garbo and baseball legend Babe Ruth. Can you spot them?

Tags: murals, New Port Richey, Pasco County, real estate

Owner financing on this great Tarpon Springs townhouse

I don’t make a habit of putting my listings on my blog (they are on my website at www.bethfrederick.com) but this is such a gorgeous townhouse that I thought I would share it with you.

Almost new (build in 2006 by Lennar Homes), this home has some dandy finishing touches (crown molding throughout, granite countertops), and there is plenty of room to stretch out in its 2,301 square feet of living space.

Many two-story town homes are concrete block construction on the first floor and wood construction on the second floor. Not this one, though — it is concrete block construction throughout.

And this may be the most attractive and compelling feature of all — the sellers are interested in providing owner financing — just 10 percent down and a very attractive interest rate, and a term of up to 30 years.

Selling price: $237,400. Give me a call and we’ll go take a look! See more at http://www.bethfrederick.com/Nav.aspx/Page=/ListNow/Default.aspx , and click on the picture.

Tags: owner financing, Tarpon Springs, town house

Savannah: Worlds away from Palm Harbor

Why a post about Savannah, Ga., when this is a blog about Pinellas County real estate? 

Excellent question.

The thing is, every once in a while it feels good to get away from Palm Harbor real estate and take a look at real estate in some other locale — hopefully one that has a great selection of restaurants.

So last weekend we decided to take a few days off and head for Savannah. We drove up on New Year’s Day and came back three days later. We took the Paula Deen tour, ate dinner in her restaurant, took a long walk through the historic district, had some heavenly ice cream at Leopold’s (an ice cream shop founded almost 100 years ago) and just generally had a wonderful time in spite of overnight temperatures in the 20s.

Once nice thing about living in Pinellas County is that we are a day’s ride or less from some great getaway spots — Miami and the Keys to the south, Orlando and St. Augustine to the east, Atlanta and the Georgia mountains to the north, to name a few.

We don’t take advantage of all that near enough. Maybe this year we will.

Tags: Palm Harbor, pinellas county, real estate, Savannah

Real estate and Palm Harbor: Is this the best market for buyers ever?

If I were to ask you to describe your income, would you use words like “reliable,” “dependable,” or “steady?”  Do you think there’s a very good chance that your job (or your business) will be around in a year, or two, or five?

If you took out some sort of loan tomorrow, would you worry about your ability to pay it back because of future income issues? Or would you be confident that your job would remain in place over the long term?

Some people have jobs that pay really well, but which probably won’t be around for long periods.  I’ll give you an example: I have a relative who is working right now as an electrical contractor in Iraq. He’s making REALLY good money, but he doesn’t expect (or want) the job to last forever. After a year or so, he’s going to want to shake the sand out of his jeans, come back to the States, and resume a more normal life.

My relative’s big but short-term income puts him in a great position to pay off debt and accumulate cash. However, it does NOT make him a great candidate for a 30-year mortgage or a five-year car loan.

But YOU, on the other hand, might be sitting on a bigger asset than you realize, if you have a steady and dependable job or other source of income.

Why? Because this may be the best time in the past, oh, 75 years or so, to buy a house.

Which brings me to my second question:

Do you know what the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices is? Okay, I’ll tell you – it is a monthly report that measures the residential housing market. It tracks home values in 20 metro markets in the U.S.

And the Case-Shiller report for October, released just this week, shows a couple of things: 1. Home values in October were flat, and 2. in spite of that, home values during 2009 have generally been in slow but steady recovery mode.

Case-Shiller reports that home values have fallen a full 30% since their peak in 2005. That drop has been stunning – nothing like it has been seen since the Depression, and perhaps even earlier than that. For people who need or want a new home, it is an opportunity of stunning proportions.

And there is even more good news; interest rates have dropped, too, If you wanted a 30-year fixed rate mortgage three years ago, it would have likely cost you around 6.4 percent. Apply for that same mortgage today, and you’ll pay more like 5 percent.

What that means is that median home prices are now about where they were in the mid-1990s, a time when just about every agrees was a really great time to buy. What makes the current conditions even more attractive than then, however, is the difference in mortgage rates – something like 5 percent now, more like 9 percent back then.   

The Wall Street JOURNAL recently did some numbers-crunching, and came up with this conclusion: Buy an average home now, finance it with a 5 percent 30-year mortgage, and the cost comes out to be around 19 times today’s average weekly earnings. Conditions haven’t been that favorable for homebuyers since the 1970s, according to the JOURNAL.

Still not good enough for you? Okay, fine – then throw in the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit, which is scheduled to run through the spring season.

Which brings us back to my original question: How would you characterize your income? Would you describe it as “reliable,” “dependable,” or “steady?”

If it is, and you can feel pretty good about relying on your income over the long term, this is probably the best time to buy a home that has come along during your entire lifetime, and probably your parents’ lifetime, and maybe even your grandparents’ lifetime as well.

The real question is the reliability of your income. These are uncertain economic times, and no one needs additional uncertainty in times like these. Unstable or unreliable income down the road could result in a foreclosure, no matter how attractive the selling price of the home is now.

But if income unreliability is not a major concern, unprecedented real estate opportunities await you.

Tags: pinellas, real estate and clearwater, real estate and palm harbor

Pet cemetery in Clearwater is Bruiser’s final resting place

Bruiser the German Shepherd did not have what you may think of as an auspicious beginning. His first owner got rid of him because he bit somebody.

A dog who bites people would probably not be accepted today as a good police dog candidate.  But back in the early 1970s, things may have been a bit looser. The St. Petersburg Police Department wanted to start a canine unit, and Bruiser was available. So that’s what happened – Bruiser became the city’s very first canine officer in the early 1970s.

Officer Bill Trappman became Bruiser’s handler, partner and friend. Together, they rescued a little girl in what was one of the decade’s biggest local crime stories.

In June of 1972, Trappman and Bruiser were called to a home near Booker Creek. An hysterical woman told Trappman that a man had broken into her home and kidnapped her two-year-old daughter.

Bruiser immediately picked up the trail, even though a recent rain had made tracking very difficult. In just a few minutes, Bruiser led Trappman to nearby Booker Creek, and Trappman’s flashlight beam picked up the sight of a man who was slamming the little girl against a tree trunk.

The man tossed the little girl in the creek and then jumped in himself. Trappman went after the girl, while Bruiser pursued the man. The girl survived the incident, and the man, a former convict who had recently been released from prison, went back to jail.
 
Trappman gave all the credit to Bruiser.

“He was everything,” Trappman said later in the St. Petersburg TIMES about his canine partner. “I was just the dummy on the end of the leash. He was the best partner I ever had and the best cop I ever knew.”

Bruiser was eight years old when all that happened. Four years later, when he was 12, the pain in his legs and hips got so bad that Trappman realized the time had come. He carried Bruiser to the vet’s, and he was put to sleep.

According to Trappman, Bruiser sniffed out more than 14,000 pounds of narcotics during his career, and helped send 127 criminals to prison.

*   *   *

On the day after Christmas, we decided to tour Green Mounds Pet Cemetery, a nearly forgotten pet cemetery behind Fletcher’s Harley-Davidson on US19 in Clearwater. The Fletcher family now owns and cares for the cemetery, having taken title to it when they bought a large tract of land behind their motorcycle dealership.

On the farthest corner of the cemetery, in the shade of a tree, we saw a statue of what looked like a German Shepherd dog. As we approached and then scraped the dirt from the closest grave marker, we saw the name “Bruiser.” Another line said, “St. Pete Canine Police.”

Bruiser’s grave is surrounded by a number of other St. Pete Police canines, perhaps 10 or so. They watch over a peaceful and well-cared-for tract that is the final resting place of several hundreds of pets, mostly dogs and cats but also a pony named Twinkles, who has her own fenced plot.

Tags: canine police, Clearwater, St. Petersburg

Two-Day Palm Harbor Arts & Crafts Festival draws crowds

The holiday season  really brings out the local arts & crafts shows, and this year has been no exception.  If you scroll back you’ll see that we visited a small arts show up in Tarpon Springs a week or two ago.

But the mother of all local arts shows is the Palm Harbor Arts & Crafts Festival, a show that has been a fixcture in Palm Harbor for the past 35 years.  Most of these shows have been held in the Olde Palm Harbior area right off Alt. 19, and that’s where the show was held again this year after a hiatus of several years during which the show was moved up to the St. petersburg College Tarpon Springs campus.

A couple of art-loving Newfoundlands

This year was fun as always, athough it seemed to me that both the crowds and the number of vendors were down a bit from the average. that should be no big surprise, I guess, what with the slow economy and the general lack of disposable income rattling around in peoples’ pockets.  Several of the vendors told us that business was way down this year, and some mentioned that the past two or three years have been something less than great.

Bad weather on Saturday, rain and cold, really put a damper on things on the first day of the two-day show, although things seemed to have picked up a bit on Sunday.

One nice thing this year is that Sunday was Pet Day, a special featured done in cconjunction with the Humane Society of Pinellas. There was a pet parade on Sunday afternoon, and a special Santa was on hand so that proud pet owners could get their pets’ poctures taken with

Dogs love Santa, too...

Santa. There were also adoptable pets on hand, along with a whole street of pet-related vendors selling everything from pet food to leashes, collars and other pet accessories.

Aside from all the official pet stuff, one nice feature was that there quite a few pets simply being walked around by their owners. Not everyone loves animals, but we do, so we really enjoyed the different pets that were on hand.

We also ran into John Mascoll, a very talented wood worker who lives in Safety Harbor. John won the best of Showe award last year, and because of that we didn’t think it was likely that he would place thisyear, but he did — a big blue ribbon was hanging in his display.

The Palm Harbor arts how is a juried show, which is nice because ot attracts vendors who might not otherwise come. Even if an artist doesn’t sell a whole lot, he or she might win a prized worth bragging about.

This was the 35the annual Palm Harbor show. It started out pretty small, but it has become a major Palm Harbor event that local people really wait for.

Rodie’s — a great breakfast in Tarpon Springs

There was time not too many years back when one of our favorite breakfast stops was a place called Rodie’s, in Tapron Springs.

Rodie's Restaurant in Tarpon Springs

Rodie’s was a small hole-in-the-wall diner kind of place on Alt. 19 just south of the Tarpon Springs downtown area.  It was a place very much favored by the locals, and the Rodie’s folks put out a very good breakfast for a very fair price.

Rodie’s did so well that they acquired a piece of land across the street from the original restaurant and built a new place — much fancier, much bigger, and a lot more upscale, at least in appearance.  They still are only open for breakfast and lunch — they close at 3 p.m.

They may have lost a little bit of the charm they offered when they were in the older, smaller place across the street. But they still really pack the place on weekend mornings, a testament to their excellent food and fair prices.

Rodie’s offers some very good burgers and sandwiches, but breakfast is when I like to go there. Besides the good assortment of pancake dishes and omelettes, they also offer some southern favorites and some Greek-inspired dishes, everything from biscuits and sausage gravy to gyro rollups and Greek salads.

Rodie’s is right next door to the brand-new Sweetbay supermarket on South Pinellas Avenue (Alt. 19).  I’m going to post something about that Sweetbay a little later on.

Tags: breakfast, pinellas county, restaurants, Tarpon Springs

Finding, buying and fixing up the perfect Pinellas County home

(A couple of weeks ago I posted a story by my friend, Stephanie Henningsen, who described her plans for buying (and renovating) her first home, using financing provided through the neighborhood Assistance Program of America. In this installment, Steph talks about the process of finding the right house, buying it and beginning the remodeling process.)

By STEPHANIE HENNINGSEN

I completed all the steps that NACA requested – I had a set amount in my bank account, my credit report had been checked (all was well), and I supplied them with several months of pay stubs and bank statements.

Now came the fun part – looking for my house.

Over the course of a few weeks, I drove around various neighborhoods to look for just the right place, within the right budget. NACA had agreed to loan me only about 80 percent of what I could afford for a home to make sure I didn’t suffer from payment shock, which could cause me to fall behind on the mortgage.

The trick was to find a house low enough in price so I would have enough money left in my mortgage package to fix it up.

One day I stopped at an old purple house that looked deserted. I happened to see one of the neighbors outside and began asking questions about it. He told me that the lady who lived in it had died and that her daughter now owned the place. However, he was unable to tell me the woman’s name or exactly where she lived.

So I went to the Web site of the Pinellas County Property Appraisers’ Office and typed in the address. After getting the owner’s name from the site, I called the office, got his phone number, and learned that the house was for sale (it turns out he was a home investor who had only purchased the house five months earlier). Within days I had a meeting with his agent to view the house.

Once inside the house, I fell in love. It had high ceilings, wood floors, a fireplace – everything I wanted in a home. The best part was that the price of the home was low enough so that I could afford the remodeling of it as well.

During this process, NACA provided me with a Realtor, who helped me with the home buying process, as well as helped me find the contractor who fixed up the house.

I closed on the house in June. In August, the remodeling process began, with my contractor adding an upstairs bathroom, rewiring the electrical system (it still had the knob and tube wiring from the 20s), adding central heat and air, completely remodeling the kitchen, and painting the home inside and out.

By December I moved into my newly remodeled home.

Tags: home renovation, Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, pinellas county, St. Petersburg

Real estate sales up nationally for fourth straight month

The National Association of Realtors says that national sales of existing homes rose in July, marking the fourth consecutive month of home sale increases.

That’s the good news, and it really is good news in a market as bad as this one has been.

 But here’s the not-so-good news; most of that increase can be traced to distressed properties – foreclosures and short sales.

Even so, any increase in home sales is a good thing, and this national trend noted by NAR seems to mirror what we have been seeing here in Tampa Bay – increasing numbers of home sales even as prices have continued a downward trend. Those lower prices have contributed to the uptick in sales, as have continuing good mortgage rates and the lure of that $8,000 federal tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

That tax credit will come to and end at the end of November, and many observers are predicting a bit of a scramble as first-time buyers try to purchase homes before the deadline.

So the real estate market really looks like this: It’s a great time to buy if you qualify as a first-time homebuyer – prices are extremely attractive, mortgage rates are low, and there is a really attractive tax credit out there for the taking. It’s not so great for people who want to move up to a better home, or who have a home they need to sell.

There really is little activity in the middle- or upper ranges of the market except for those relatively rare cash buyers.