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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

Pinellas County is #57 when it comes to water quality

We’re Number 57! We’re Number 57!

Okay, I’m not really sure this is something to rejoice over, but Pinellas County was recently ranked 57th in terms of the quality of its drinking water.

Let me explain.

An organization called the Environmental Working Group recently looked at the quality of tap water in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. It measured all that water for such pollutants as herbicides, factory solvents, radium, arsenic, and cyanide — more than 300 substances in all.
Miami-Dade’s water utility was the best in Florida, ranked 46th on the nationwife list of 100; Ft. Lauderdale, Hollywood and four other Broward County utilities logged only a few violations.

Pinellas County was ranked 57th, Hillsborough County 65th, Tampa Water Department 68th, and Orlando Utilities Commission was 81st.

Pensacola made the list, but was last at Number 100. 

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection says water users in Pensacola shouldn’t worry — overall, Florida has very high-quality drinking water.

Personally, I’d rank Florida very high when it comes to taste.  The worst water I’ve tasted was in Iowa, and the next-worst was in Southern California. In both places, you really don’t want to drink the water out of the tap.

Tags: Palm Harbor, real estate, water

Got your eye on a new Palm Harbor home? Don’t drag your feet.

I just sold a house to a couple who had been working with me since last November.  That’s right, it took them a full year to find the house they wanted to buy.

Were these people unusually picky, or were their requirements so specific that the right house simply wasn’t available for a really long time?  I would say “no” to both counts; I think they just wanted to be very careful in what they considered a very volatile market.  They wanted to make sure they didn’t pay too much in case the real estate market continued to free-fall, and they wanted to be sure they didn’t end up with a house that was going to cost a lot to upgrade.

This couple looked very actively during the past year, and they actually made offers on several houses. But if the negotiations on those houses began to bog down, or if the sellers didn’t act like they wanted to significantly drop their prices (and do so quickly), these people would back away.

I think their attitude was exactly the opposite of buyer attitudes two or three years ago, when buyers thought they had to act very swiftly in order to get the home they wanted. Now, caution rules the day for buyers, along with low-ball offers. I don’t think the low offers come so much from a desire to play hardball as from a fear of paying too much in a market where prices may have a way to go before hitting bottom.

The point of all this is the new first-time homebuyer tax credit, which the Congress just recently passed. This new tax credit offers an $8,000 tax credit to first-time homebuyers, and a credit of $6,500 to repeat buyers. That credit for repeat buyers MIGHT entice some move-up buyers to come back into the market, which has mostly been dominated by first-time buyers.

The original tax credit, which was launched last spring and which was to run only through the end of November, made home ownership possible for many first-time buyers. This new version continues to offer that, while also offering a tidy tax credit to people who are NOT first-timers.

But here’s the bad part (and the reason why I started out by talking about those buyers who took a full year to find a home they wanted to buy); this new tax credit is authorized only through April – buyers have to have a binding contract in place by April 30, 2010.

If you think your home search may take a number of months, you’d better get started now. April will be here before you know it.

Tags: first time home buyer, Palm Harbor, real estate, tax credit

22nd Annual Veterans Day observances at Curlew Memory Gardens in Palm Harbor

For the 22nd straight year, Curlew Hills Memory Gardens in Palm Harbor hosted a Veterans Day service .

The program began at around 9:30 a.m. A piper played the bagpipes, a choir from St. Alfred’s Episcopal Church sang to the accompaniment of a keyboard player, and an honor guard presented the colors. There was a threat of rain during the early morning hours, but the sun came out just in time for the service.

Remarks were delivered by Gunnery Sergeant Nathaniel Garcia, a Marine stationed at U.S. Central Command in Tampa.  The ceremony was concluded with taps played by Ron Ashley of the Marine Corps League’s Morris F. Dixon Chapter #54.

A contigent from the Palm Harbor Fire department was also on hand for the ceremonies.

The event was open to the public.

A number of other ceremonies and remembrances were held throughout the Tampa Bay area, as well.  perhaps the largest was at Bay Pines, the Veterans Administration facility in mid-county. A year ago, my husband wrote about the Memorial Day ceremonies at Bay Pines and about finding the grave of an old friend. You can find that post elsewhere on this blog.

Tags: Palm Harbor, real estate, veterans day

Finding — and financing — the perfect Pinellas County home

Stephanie Henningsen

I met Stephanie a while back, and she told me a story about how she was able to buy her own home, even though she was a single woman at the time living on one paycheck.  Not only was she able to buy the home, but she was also able to finance an extensive renovation that brought back a fine old home in St. Petersburg that deserved to be saved. I asked her if she would describe the process for my blog. Here is the first installment — there will be more coming.

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By STEPHANIE HENNINGSEN

I’ve always been attracted to older homes, the homes you find in historical neighborhoods immediately outside the downtown areas of municipalities around the country. It’s the details that draw me in – lots of windows, high ceilings, wood floors, crown molding.

Many of these remodeled homes come with a price tag that is way out of my range. However, I found a way to live in my dream home (complete with wood floors!) without going broke in the process.

A friend told me about the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), an advocacy program designed to help:

• Homeowners refinance mortgages
• Low-income families find an affordable home
• Turn over neighborhoods by offering mortgages that allow homeowners who make above a certain income to buy a run-down home and remodel it.

NACA helps potential buyers through the following steps to prepare them for homeownership.

Once I had completed these steps, I was ready for the next adventure – finding my dream home.

Tags: first time homebuyer, pinellas county, real estate, St. Petersburg

The Dunedin Country Club

Dunedin Country Club

Picture this:

You are a developer in Dunedin, Fla., and you have a vision about a new housing development. You want to attract people from up north who may want to relocate to a warmer, sunnier climate.

So you buy a big tract of land and you subdivide it into house lots. Right in the middle of it you leave plenty of space for a golf course. And just to make sure you make the course really attractive and interesting, you hire one of the greatest living golf course architects to design it.

Sounds like a pretty contemporary scenario, right?

In this case, however, it was not.  All of this took place in the 1920s. The subdivision included Dunedin’s Fairway Estates, and the golf course was the Donald Ross-designed Dunedin Country Club.

This story starts in the early years of the 20th century, when Baron Otto Quarles arrived in Florida from Europe. He bought a huge tract of land north of Dunedin and built a large mansion on the site, but within a few years he lost interest and relocated to the other side of Tampa Bay, in Tampa.

About 20 years later, a developer acquired the land and announced very ambitious plans. Two golf courses, a casino and more than 6,000 home sites were part of the scheme. But then came the great Florida real estate bust of 1929, and the project went bankrupt.

Before that happened, however, Donald Ross was retained to design the golf course. Ross was a native of Scotland who designed more than 300 U.S. golf courses during his career. He was based in North Carolina and designed many courses there, but Florida was fertile ground for his talents, too. Ross-designed golf courses are highly prized; today, fewer than 20 Donald Ross courses survive in Florida.

The Depression took its toll on the course. By the mid-1930s it was in need of major repairs and maintenance. In 1938, the city of Dunedin obtained ownership of the course. Money was invested in the course, and golfers began using it again in 1938.

A real break for the course happened in 1945, when it was selected to become the home course of the PGA of America. The PGA leased the club and made Dunedin its national headquarters. That relationship lasted until 1962, when the PGA moved to another location in Palm Beach Gardens/

During those years the course was played by some of the greatest name in golf — Ben Hogan, Sam Snead. Bobby Jones and Babe Zaharias among them.
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The Dunedin Country Club has been going through some financial and management issues lately. Here’s a link to a story in the St. Petersburg TIMES:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/article1017449.ece

Tags: country club, Dunedin, real estate

Dunedin awaits rebirth of Fenway Hotel

Dunedin's Fenway Hotel

If I could travel through time, I think I might like to visit West Central Florida around 1925. The area was in the middle of a big land boom, and communities such as Clearwater and Dunedin were in the middle of exciting growth.

 Downtown areas were being developed, new hotels and commercial buildings were being built, and some beautiful and expensive private homes were going up.
 
Some residents of Dunedin felt that their community was being left a bit behind. Visitors to the area were attracted to Clearwater and St. Petersburg, not to Dunedin, which didn’t have the kind of resort hotel that people flocked to in the 1920s to escape the cold and snow of their native northern homes.

A local realty company decided to try to do something about that, and started pushing the idea of a very high-end resort hotel on Dunedin’s Main Street (now Edgewater Drive). The financing scheme seems a little offbeat – the developers asked every Dunedin resident to chip in a few bucks, and quite a few stepped up and did just that.
 
A Clearwater developer, George H. Bowles, paid $250,000 for a controlling interest in the still-unfinished hotel, and he was able to find the financing necessary to complete the project. The hotel opened in 1925.

One interesting feature that Bowles brought to the new hotel was WGHB, the first commercial radio station in the area. Bowles was a big radio enthusiast, and the December opening ceremonies of the Fenway were carried on a six-hour broadcast that was beamed across the country.

Remains of the Fenway Hotel pier

The Fenway attracted many wealthy visitors and it was an important icon of Dunedin through the late 1950s. But like many grand hotels of that era, it fell into disrepair and went out of business. It later became the campus of Trinity College, which then took the name of its parent institution, Schiller International University.

In recent months, a St. Petersburg attorney, George Rahdert, has stepped forward with plans to re-develop the old Fenway. There has been a lot of vigorous debate about what the Fenway’s future would be, from demolition to a reinvigorated hotel. Rahdert wants to restore the existing hotel and add new wings.
 
Some neighbors aren’t very happy about a new commercial enterprise operating near their homes. Other local residents are delighted that such an historic relic might be saved and restored.
 
The Fenway by the Bay Hotel that Rahdert envisions would include a ballroom, a 150-seat restaurant and more than 100 hotel rooms. What the developers have in mind is a “condotel,”. a facility where people can purchase suites which they could occupy for part of the year and rent out as hotel rooms at other times.

The project is now going through county review and approval processes. 

Go here for more information about the Fenway Hotel project.

Tags: Dunedin, fenway hotel, North Pinellas County, real estate

Kelly’s: fun dining in Dunedin

Kelly's Restaurant, Dunedin

We had dinner on Sunday night at Kelly’s on Main Street in Dunedin.

We don’t go there that often, mostly because when we eat in downtown Dunedin we often end up across the street at Cafe Alfresco. But Kelly’s has good food as well as a certain avant garde attitude that’s fun.

When we first lived here Kelly’s had a pretty ordinary outside dining area in back. Now, that area has been re-designed and enlarged, and there’s plenty of room for entertainment and for a very active bar area off to one side. When we were there, a few people were eating inside and many more were out back, eating and drinking and listening to live music.

Also, the owners of Kelly’s have acquired and developed the next-door Chic-A-Boom Room, a cocktail bar, as well as Blur one door down, a night club.

Kelly’s puts on a very good breakfast, and many people head there on the weekends for eggs benedict and other breakfast goodies. If you go, get there early, or you will have to wait for a seat.

Kelly’s puts a premium on fun. There’s a manniquin near the front door (named Peggy Sue) who greets diners as they enter, and the tables feature unique salt-and-pepper shakers as well as wildly different coffee mugs.

Kelly’s fits nicely into the old Our Town style of Dunedin’s downtown, but at the same time it sports a kitschy bit of new wave color. It’s hip and fun, and the food is great.  Don’t miss it.

Tags: dining, Dunedin, real estate

Annual Parrot Head party comes to downtown Palm Harbor

Parrothead crowd in Old Palm Harbor

Somewhere around 15,000 Parrotheads turned out in downtown Palm Harbor Saturday to chill out, sip a few cold ones, and enjoy the style of music made famous by the likes of Jimmy Buffet.

Jimmy himself didn’t show up, but the Carribbean Chillers did, and the Jimmy Buffet tribune band put out a Buffet-style sound that had the crowd up and dancing in the street.

Florida Avenue, downtown Palm Harbor’s main drag, was blocked off for the day-long program, which started at around 2 p.m. amd went deep into the night.

As you might expect, there were plenty of loud shirts, parrot headresses and fat cigars. And the beer flowed, as you would expect from a crowd like this and an event sponsored in large part by Budweiser.

More than 30 vendors were on hand, selling everything from food items to t-shirts to parrot-themed products of one kind or another.

The event, officially known as the Palm Harbor Parrot Head Party, is the biggest fundraiser of the year for Old Palm Harbor Main Street, the group of downtown merchants and others who promote the historic district near Alt. 19.

It has grown every year for the past several years, which makes the sponsors happy in spite of the fact that sponsorship costs have gone up steeply as it becomes more difficult in a slow economy to find people to put up sponsorship dollars.

This was the eighth annual Parrot Head party in downtown Palm Harbor. See more pictures here.

Tags: Palm Harbor, parrothead, real estate

Shedding a little light on downtown Clearwater real estate

Lamp post in downtown Clearwater

By now you’ve probably figured out that I have something of a weakness for lamp posts. There’s one up at the top of this blog, providing a little illumination for the Pinellas Newsboy. Also, I’ve done posts showing lamp posts in Dunedin, Tarpon Springs, over at Disney and, now in Clearwater.

It’s not just a personal weakness for lamp posts. I think they are good metaphors for the emerging downtowns that we are seeing in North Pinellas County. These downtowns have lived through some pretty steep declines as downtown areas have been allowed to decay as they have been forgotten in favor of suburban developments. But they are roaring back as we come to appreciate what they have to offer in terms of shopping, dining and living.

Downtowns offer something community-wise that simply can’t be matched. We’re lucky to have these areas re-emerging, and we also are lucky to have had residents, business people and political leaders who have been able to share the vision of reinvigorated downtowns.

By the way, this lamp post is one of many that line Cleveland Street in downtown Clearwater.

Tags: Clearwater, real estate