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Archive for the 'Towns' Category

Clearwater’s Pier 60: The place for sunsets

I spent a very enjoyable day yesterday with a client from out of town, someone who has really fallen in love with Dunedin. I think we’ve found her and her family the perfect townhouse. In fact, they spent so much time on the Internet that they had a pretty good idea what property they wanted before they ever came to Pinellas County and got down to some serious looking.

Anyway, once we got done with our real estate business, she went off on her own to do some more exploring of the area. She ended up forgoing dinner, opting instead for some ice cream and a visit to Clearwater Beach to watch the sunset. This picture is one she took of Pier 60, the pier at Clearwater Beach where locals and tourists gather to watch the sunset. It’s a tradition that has been going on for the past 10 or 12 years, and it’s loosely based on the nightly sunset salute that’s been taking place at Key West for years.

As you can see by the picture, the sunsets are spectacular. But you will also enjoy the local musicians, the buskers (street performers) as well as the food vendors that set up every night. There’s plenty to do and see around here, and the Pier 60 sunsets are up at the top of the list.

Tags: Clearwater, Pier 60, sunset, things to do

Federal government offers mortgage help

Okay, so you’ve been living in your home in Pinellas County and faithfully making your mortgage payments, but your home’s value has been steadily slipping and now you owe more than the place is worth. You keep reading about new government programs that are supposed to help, but you need to find out more.

Fear not – there’s a place you can go to find the help you need.

That place is www.MakingHomeAffordable.gov. It’s a website designed to describe the benefits of a federal program called, well, Making Home Affordable. It offers homeowners a number of opportunities to either refinance their mortgages, or modify the mortgages they already have.

The Making Home Affordable program is financed with $75 billion for loan servicers and borrowers. Its designers say that it should be able to offer mortgage help to four million homeowners who need to modify their loans to make them more affordable, or who need to negotiate short sales of their properties with their mortgage providers.

Officials say that the money will allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance up to five million loans they own (or guarantee). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have set up web sites and toll-free hotlines for borrowers who need to determine if their mortgages fall under Fannie or Freddie. Fannie Mae’s is www.fanniemae.com/homeaffordable (phone number (800) 732-6643); Freddie Mac’s is www.freddiemac.com/avoidforeclosure (phone number (800) 373-3343).

Some borrowers might prefer to get information first from their own mortgage servicer. To do that, go to www.HopeNow.com and fill out an application. That web site is operated by an alliance of mortgage servicers and nonprofit counselors. You can talk to them on the phone at (888) 995-4673.

No matter where you live in North Pinellas County – Tarpon Springs, Palm Harbor, Dunedin, Clearwater, Safety Harbor, or anywhere else, for that matter – the information offered applies to you.

Tags: Add new tag, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Mortgage, North Pinellas County

The newsboys are coming

Now, who is this motley collection of youngsters, and what are they doing on my blog, which is (mostly) about real estate?
I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.
But I CAN tell you that these guys are newspaper boys from sometime around 1900 or 1910.
This picture came from the Library of Congress. I found a number of other really good pictures of young paper boys there, too.
These newspaper boys hark back to a time when the latest, freshest and most accurate news was found on the pages of the local newspaper. If you wanted to know what was going on in the world, or in your own community, or if you simply wanted the latest baseball scores, you went outside, looked up and down any city street, and you hailed the closest newsboy. There was probably more than one out there at any given moment, especially if it was close to presstime.
The newspaper boys are gone now, but their spirit still carries the latest news.
And that’s all I can tell you. But watch this space.

Tags: blog, newsboys, pinellas county

Ugly bathroom contest

Now, this is an ugly bathroom

Do you have an ugly bathroom?

Now, we’re not talking about a bathroom with some rust stains in the sink, or a tear or two in the flooring, or even a few rips in the shower curtain up by the curtain rod rings. No, we’re talking about a seriously nasty bathroom, one that you don’t like to go into even when you really, really have to go.

Luxury Bath Systems of Tampa Bay, which has a place of business at 33851 US19N in Palm Harbor, is looking for a really, really ugly bathroom. It has to be in Pasco, Pinellas or Hillsborough counties, but otherwise its an open field.

Here’s the good part; if your ugly bathroom is chosen as the worst of the worst, you might win a full bath remodel – a re-do that will include KraftMaid vanities from Grand Kitchen & Bath of St. Petersburg; vanity tops from Granite Plus Inc. in St. Petersburg; as well as new plumbing fixtures, toilets, lighting and doors. In other words, the works, something valued at $8,500.

Here’s what you do: submit a photo of your nasty bath at http://www.uglybathroomcontest.net/. You must submit your entry by March 31, and five finalists will be chosen and posted on the Luxury Bath Systems website between April 3 and 26.

"After" bathroom picture

Once the finalists are posted, people can visit the website and vote for their favorite. On May 1, the winner will be announced.

FULL DISCLOSURE DEPARTMENT: The really ugly bathroom in the picture at the top was an entry in the ugly bathroom contest from an earlier year (we didn’t want to influence the outcome of this year’s contest). The really pretty bathroom picture shows a bathroom done by Luxury Bath Systems, but it is NOT a makeover of the ugly bathroom above. There; we feel better!

Tags: Tampa Bay, ugly bathroom

Mortgage rates down, but bank profits up

Here’s a fact you may not have realized – interest rates on home mortgages have been coming down, but the profit margins for lenders on those mortgages have been going up.

What that means is that mortgages could come down even further, and lenders could still make a nice profit on them.

In January, the average rate on 30-year fixed mortgages fell below five percent. It was the first time that rates had dipped so low since Freddie Mac started keeping track of rates in 1971, 38 years ago.

In spite of that, bank profits on 30-year fixed mortgages have been going up. The gap between mortgage rates and 10-year U.S. Treasury yields (2.5 percent) hasn’t been so great in the past 27 years.

Enlightened home buyers aren’t very happy about that. Some officials in the federal government aren’t pleased, either. California Congresswoman Maxine Waters serves on the House Banking Committee. She believes lenders should drop their rates to benefit homebuyers.

“If the government is making sure that cost is dropping for the banks, it should be dropping just as much for consumers,” she said. “But they’re not. Banks could make loans at 4.5 percent, or even lower, and it would still be profitable.”

Some experts believe banks are reluctant to drop rates for consumers any further because of the losses they have experienced through foreclosures and a more than sluggish real estate market.

It will be interesting to see what the Obama Administration will do about home lending rates as a condition of the bailout.

Tags: interest rates

California leads the real estate value decline

All the data appears to be in, and we can now say with authority that the state with the biggest decline in real estate values for 2008 was….

(Drum roll, please….)

CALIFORNIA!

That’s right, California was the big winner (actually, loser) in the real estate downturn sweepstakes, losing 26.9 percent of its real estate value during the year. Next was Nevada, with a 22.8 percent value drop, followed by Arizona (19 percent) and then (ahem) Florida, with an 18.2 percent drop.

Values actually dropped in 35 states during 2008.

That’s the story for 2008, but what about the total drop in values since, say, the peak of real estate value in July 2006? California still leads the way with a 42 percent decline. Nevada protected its second place position with a 39 percent decline. Arizona and Florida are tied for third place at 33 percent.

If you want to look at actual metro markets rather than states, we see nine California markets leading the list, but then Miami-Dade in Florida captures the 10th spot.

Did any market actually gain value during 2008? Actually, several did. If you live in Binghampton, N.Y., you live in a place where real estate actually appreciated by 7.78%. Plattsburgh, N.Y., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Rocky Mount, N.C., Auburn, N.Y. and Florence-Mussel Shoals, AL also did pretty well.

This data comes from First American CoreLogic, which follows real estate values across the country.

Tags: california, real estate, values

Golfer’s paradise

If you like to ski or run around on snowmobiles, Pinellas County is obviously not for you. But if you love to play golf, then Pinellas County is close to paradise.

According to golfable.com, a website that keeps track of golf courses, Pinellas County has no fewer than 53 courses. And there’s even more than that available to golfers who don’t mind short drives north to Pasco County, east to Hillsborough County, or south over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to Manatee County.

If you click on the golfable.com link above, it will take you to the websites of many of the golf courses that it lists.

Tags: golf, pinellas county

The light rail saga continued

Since I got all fired up recently about the new light rail system in Phoenix, and how nice such a system would be in Tampa Bay, I thought I’d share our recent experience with light rail transportation in Baltimore.

Light rail in Baltimore

This past week, we spent a few days with family in Connecticut, and then went on to Baltimore for two more days. If you’ve ever flow into Baltimore, you know that the Baltimore-Washington Airport is not very close to the downtown area – it’s located at a central point between Baltimore and Washington, DC.

When I was making arrangements for the trip, I found a shuttle service that could take us from the airport to downtown Baltimore. I don’t remember the cost exactly, but it was around $15 per person each way, or around $60 for the two of us round-trip.

A little later, we discovered that Baltimore has a light rail system that runs from Hunt Valley, north of the city, then right through downtown Baltimore and then on to Glen Burnie in Anne Arundel County. One leg of the rail line down near the Glen Burnie end shoots off and goes directly to the airport.

So that’s what we did.

There was a little bit of a walk through the airport terminal to get to the train boarding area, but once through the terminal doors the train was sitting right there waiting for us. The fare was a measly $1.60 per person (and it could have been just $.55 if I had read down a little further and found the special 55-plus fare). Once on board, the train made about 10 stops before delivering us to the Baltimore Convention Center right downtown.

We had decided to stay in the colorful Fells Point area, and that was still a fair distance away, so we flagged down a cab for the last leg of the trip.

Here are the best parts of the light rail train ride; it was really cheap as well as hugely convenient, and it only took 30 minutes to get from the airport to the heart of downtown Baltimore. It also made us feel like we were doing the right thing, environmentally speaking.

Here was the worst part: On the return trip from downtown to the airport, we just missed the Airport train and had to wait 30 minutes for the next one. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but it was cold. No, actually, it was worse than just cold. It was REALLY cold, around 24 degrees, and we had to stand outside for a half-hour. For thin-blooded Floridians, it was torture.

Still, we loved it. One of the light rail stops is Camden Yards, and we’re thinking about flying up there next summer for a Tampa Bay Rays – Baltimore Orioles game. I’m still dreaming about a Pinellas County light rail system, something that could serve Tarpon Springs, Palm Harbor, Dunedin, Clearwater and other North Pinellas communities as well as St. Petersburg and Tampa.

If you want to learn more about Baltimore’s light rail system, go to www.mtamaryland.com/

Tags: baltimore, light rail, pinellas

A proud Greek heritage is on display in Tarpon Springs

Tarpon Springs is a charming Florida Gulf Coast town known for its Greek restaurants, bakeries, gift shops and sponge merchants. It is very much a Greek community, and it traces its Greek roots back more than 100 years, when Greek divers and their families immigrated to Tarpon Springs to work in the town’s sponge trade.

Florida’s sponge industry really began in the early 1800s, many miles south of Tarpon Springs, in Key West. Men would crisscross the shallow waters off Key West in rowboats or sailboats, scooping grass sponges off the bottom with long rakes. The harvested sponges would be carried by boat to Tampa Bay, and then shipped from there to New York City.

Key West quickly became the major source of sponges for customers in New York and throughout the Northeast, but that was about to change as technology allowed men to dive to the ocean floor. Divers soon found there were larger sponge beds, and a much larger variety of sponge types, in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, further up the west coast of Florida.

By the late 1880s, a wealthy Philadelphia banker named John K. Cheney sought to take advantage of those bountiful sponge resources off Florida’s coast.  He built warehouses in the town of Tarpon Springs, and soon he, along with another businessman named Ernest Meres, became the town’s first sponge merchants. He bought sponges locally and then sold them to associates in New York City.

In 1896, a Greek immigrant who had been working in New York as a sponge buyer, John Cocoris, arrived in Tarpon Springs. He went to work for John Cheney, and soon recruited 500 sponge divers from Greece.

The Greek divers were amazed to find that the floor of the Gulf was thick with sponges of all kinds. Baskets of large wool-sponges could be quickly sent in baskets from the sea floor up to the boats that waited on the surface. Cheney and his associates added boats and divers to increase their harvest.

Just a few years after the turn of the century, there were more than 1,500 Greek sponge divers and other workers employed in the Tarpon Springs sponge trade. By 1936, that number had increased to more than 2,000, and Tarpon Springs was recognized around the world as the sponge capital of the world.

However, the sponge industry faced a number of serious challenges in the 1940s. First, Red Tide attacked the gulf and killed most of the sponges. Then, synthetic sponges were developed. and they cut into market previously dominated by natural sponges. It took more than 20 years for the sponge market to right itself.

Now, tourism has replaced sponge diving as Tarpon Springs’ major economic activity. Tourists enjoy Tarpon’s Greek influence and culture, which have survived the ups and downs of the 100-year-old sponge trade.

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Marc Washburn is a sponge merchant in Tarpon Springs and also on the Internet. His e-store, Natural Bath & Body Shop, carries traditional Greek olive oil soaps, Loofah, and a large selection of sea sponges.

Tags: Greek, Tarpon Springs

Don’t pack your bags just yet

Looking at those shiny new light rail cars in the previous post, you may be thinking that a move to that part of the world wouldn’t be such a bad idea. But before you start packing, consider this little tidbit.
Standard & Poor’s puts out a monthly report on home values through its Case/Shiller Home Price Indices, a fancy term for something that S&P calls “the leading measure of U.S. home prices.” It looks at home values in 20 different markets around the nation.
So guess which market has lost the most value during the past year? That’s right, Phoenix. Home prices in that area have slipped more than 32 per cent, more than anywhere else in the country.
Where is Tampa Bay in all of that? Homes in this area have dropped a little under 20 per cent — a good-sized drop, but well below the crash-and-burn experience in Phoenix. Or, for that matter, in Las Vegas, which was second on the S&P list at 31.7 per cent; or Miami, which lost 29 per cent of its real estate value (and led the Florida lost-value sweepstakes).
There’s more, if you’d like to look it over. Just visit www.standardandpoors.com/indices.

Tags: home values