Royal Scoop Homemade Ice Cream will be kicking off their 1st Annual "I Pledge" to celebrate and reward patriotism among the children of Bonita Springs! Any child 12 and under who recites the Pledge of Allegiance from memory will receive a FREE scoop of ice cream, every Monday in July 2011.
Prior to ushering buyers around in my car I’ve occasionally recommended buyers drive around a little to familiarize themselves with the area. If, for example, there is a cute little cottage that buyers think they just have to see but I know it’s built between a Quikkie Mart and a funeral home, maybe a drive by is in order before we load up in the car.
After emailing a few properties to buyers, some of which may have had Quikkie-Mart-like issues, they headed out for a delightful day of sight seeing and neighborhood previewing. They more or less drove by most of the properties that fit their criteria.
When I spoke with them about taking an actual tour of the homes they remarked, “You know that home on La-di-dah Street? Well, we drove by it and now we have some concerns about the crime.”
It turns out that one of the neighbors had a sign up in their front yard, right beside the "posted no trespassing” sign, that read something to the effect that their home was being stolen from on a regular basis and that the help of any and all good Samaritans was being called upon to dial the sheriff and/or the home owner if said alleged thief was spotted mid-crime by passers by.
Florida real estate law precludes real estate agents from sharing so very many important things such as crime rates and whether or not we know the subject property is circled by homes occupied with sex offenders. Dateline NBC can show their faces on TV but your real estate agent is only allowed to be “the source of the source”.
So I “source of the sourced” an email to the buyers a few crime tip websites like the local sheriff’s site, plus www.crimereports.com, www.spotcrime.com and www.familywatchdog.us so they could vet to their own satisfaction and then I hit the road.
I decided that I needed to see the alleged criminal complaint sign for myself. For what it’s worth, my search turned up very little crime in quite a wide vicinity. I was curious and just had to look.
When I drove by the property I spoke with a neighbor who volunteered their opinion of what was going on with the crime sign. That explanation included the words “cheese sliding off the cracker”. (His words) He was one of a few neighbors who was over the shenanigans but just didn’t know what to do.
As law would have it, it turns out that mental illness is a protected class (disability) and probably a fair housing violation if brought into the equation. So even if the neighbor shared with me that the sign maker was crazier than a June bug in May and patrolled their property line on a unicycle, wearing a tin foil hat, Mardi Gras beads and brandishing a machete, I have no place telling the potential buyer.
It’s not considered a material defect of the property and there is no “check box” on the seller’s disclosure for “unusual neighbors”. In case you were curious, the other protected classes are race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, age, disability or marital status.
So the lesson for home buyers and even prospective tenants is to talk to neighbors and research a neighborhood on your own regardless of “signs of crimes”. Crime rates, sex offenders and the protected classes are off limits to your real estate agent but you can ask for information on how to research it.
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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area. Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor. If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.
You can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter by visiting www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com and entering your email in the subscription area on the center pane of the web page or by adding us to your reader by subscribing to this blog. Oh, and if you’re reading this content anywhere else but www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com or Naples Daily News it is probably stolen.
Truth be told, I was on my way to surveil the circuit training path at Bonita Bay’s River Park when the sky opened up and it began raining like crazy. I actually passed his bench up and then realized that there were banana trees growing beside it and there was actually a hand of bananas … so I backed up and took this picture.
Only in Bonita Springs would there be a bunch of bananas growing beside a bus bench. Bonita Bay has benches for the residents to catch a ride to the beach park on Bonita Beach. It’s one of the amenities of Bonita Bay. You just wait on the bench and the bus comes by a the posted interval times and takes riders to the Bonita Bay beach pavilion. Disclaimer: Not all Bonita Bay benches have bananas but they have the potential to grow them. :) This bench is located on Country Club Drive close to Monterra.
Banana bus benches in Bonita Bay trump snow drifted benches anywhere … even if they’re bedazzled.
There are plenty of folks reading this in black and white print who don’t use or enjoy computers. I’ve had a few phone calls (and letters) from folks who remind me that not everybody has access to the internet.
As a consumer, you don’t have to be a technological genius to buy or sell real estate.
What’s most important is to be able to hire someone who will use technology as a tool for you. At this stage in the game, if the real estate agent you are currently using or are planning to use to sell your home can’t give you a technological edge you’re at a distinct disadvantage. That agent is selling buggy whips in the day and age of electric cars.
Is this pick on real estate agent day? No. You can literally take any business built anywhere in the world and they should have evolved to be using the latest technology so why shouldn’t your real estate agent? Those businesses and real estate agents who haven’t will eventually fade away no different than any other business that didn’t evolve.
I run with a nerdy tribe of folks; mortgage brokers, contractors, financial planners, restaurateurs, advertising/public relations agencies. What they all have in common is the ability to promote, find and convert business on the internet as part of their marketing programs. There’s no reason why your real estate agent shouldn’t be held to the same standard even if you don’t “get the internet”.
Most home sellers don’t understand how the internet works with regard to real estate and what they should expect and demand of the real estate agent they choose to market their real estate. So, for the sake of those who read the paper-paper offline here are a few things you should know and demand as a marketing service to sell your real estate.
These would be deal breakers if I was hiring a real estate agent or helping a family member hire an agent. At minimum an agent should have:
If you’re a consumer and you’re not using computers and technology, you don’t even know what you don’t know. Those are just the basic four, deal breaker must-haves and yes, there are licensees running around out there fakin’ it until evolution catches up with them.
So, if you don’t have a family member advocate who can help you, go forth and hire the kid down the street with a laptop or an iPad to sit down with you for an hour to check out your agent and their listings online. You should also Google your street address or the address of a property your chosen real estate agent currently has listed.
If you can’t find your agent’s name or the street address of one of their listings cluttering up the first page of Google it means you’re buying buggy whips instead of the modern real estate technology you deserve.
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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area. Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor. If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.
You can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter by visiting www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com and entering your email in the subscription area on the center pane of the web page or by adding us to your reader by subscribing to this blog. Oh, and if you’re reading this content anywhere else but www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com or Naples Daily News it is probably stolen.
How do you really know if now is a great time to buy? That’s a question I was asked a few days ago by someone who is looking at the real estate market in our area. They’ve been following the prices but also worried by negative, conflicting reports in the news.
Picking on Florida real estate is now a sport and sadly most of the time we, Southwest Florida, get lumped in with the row of vacant towers on Miami Beach and other pointes of slaughter still digging out from under their inventory.
So, how is a buyer supposed to know when the best time to buy is? As a buyer you might have educated yourself on the area, the closing procedures and the pricing but you want to know that you’re not “getting in too soon”.
The pundits will tell you that you can’t gauge the bottom and that the market is like a pendulum swinging, you can’t tell it’s passed the mid point at the bottom until it’s already began to swing upward. What they don’t tell you in the “now is a great time to buy commercials” is how to calculate if it’s really is a great time to buy in your city or neighborhood of choice.
Inventory and location are the two factors to consider when deciding whether or not to purchase real estate. For the sake of the buyer that was in a quandary about moving forward we did a couple of simple calculations to determine how much inventory was in the neighborhood they were considering.
It’s called an absorption rate and it determined, for this buyer, that there was six months of inventory in the community. Six months is a balanced market, by the way. It was only a few years ago that there was seventeen years of inventory in this very neighborhood, which drove prices down. Yes, you read that right … seventeen years.
The current six month of inventory is actually misleading, and not in a bad way, because there are really only three active units and a pile of pending sales not yet closed which is creating illusion that there is more inventory. A typical buyer would have not suspected that the values in that neighborhood have actually risen nine percent over the last year due to the lack of inventory.
Since its summer and I had a little time on my hands and it got me thinking about the real estate market as a whole. Just for giggles I did a broad stroke of the southwest Florida brush and calculated the inventory for single family homes in the multiple listing system.
The total came up to about twelve months of inventory which really shouldn’t mean a whole lot to you unless you’ve been watching the market and knew that two years ago there was a little over twenty-six months of inventory.
Bad news sells so you probably wouldn’t ordinarily hear about that sort of market improvement. If you were expecting news like half of the real estate inventory being absorbed to be trumpeted by television media portals we should have emailed it to Sarah Palin so they could have at least discovered it.
Keep in mind that lumped in that twelve month pile are likely neighborhoods with far more inventory than twelve months and even some with less. The point is that you need to get those hyper local figures from your real estate agent prior to even placing an offer.
Finding out existing inventory and the local absorption rate for the city, the neighborhood or even the street should be a step in your decision making. If your real estate agent can’t do those figures for you, you’ve probably got the wrong real estate agent.
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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area. Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor. If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.
You can subscribe to a weekly email newsletter by visiting www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com and entering your email in the subscription area on the center pane of the web page or by adding us to your reader by subscribing to this blog. Oh, and if you’re reading this content anywhere else but www.LifeInBonitaSprings.com or Naples Daily News it is probably stolen.
For more real estate market reports read also:
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All information is deem accurate, not guaranteed and subject to change. Check the date on this report for freshness. If you have questions regarding your particular neighborhood, your street or your home specifically you’re welcome to contact us for a current market report. Real estate consumers that read this website are urged to seek independent, professional legal, real estate and financial advice before engaging in any transaction. All information is deemed, accurate, subject to change and not guaranteed.
For more real estate market reports read also:
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All information is deem accurate, not guaranteed and subject to change. Check the date on this report for freshness. If you have questions regarding your particular neighborhood, your street or your home specifically you’re welcome to contact us for a current market report. Real estate consumers that read this website are urged to seek independent, professional legal, real estate and financial advice before engaging in any transaction. All information is deemed, accurate, subject to change and not guaranteed.
For more real estate market reports read also:
###
All information is deem accurate, not guaranteed and subject to change. Check the date on this report for freshness. If you have questions regarding your particular neighborhood, your street or your home specifically you’re welcome to contact us for a current market report. Real estate consumers that read this website are urged to seek independent, professional legal, real estate and financial advice before engaging in any transaction. All information is deemed, accurate, subject to change and not guaranteed.
BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. (May 26, 2011) – A real pyrotechnic grand finale will highlight a high-powered laser light show as darkness falls in Bonita Springs on Monday, July 4th, 2011 at the City’s annual Star Spangled Bonita celebration. The light display will conclude the City’s annual Party in the Park beginning at 6 p.m.
Independence Day kicks off with the traditional morning parade presented by Bonita Springs Fire Control and Rescue District, and reconvenes at Riverside Park at 6 p.m.
A full schedule of live entertainment includes Jay Frost & Three Below and Cahlua & Cream, an array of children’s amusements, and traditional July 4th events culminating with a laser light show and fireworks display.
For the first time, Bonita’s own Captain Johnny O (#3 Johnny Depp look alike) will perform. He returns to Bonita Springs after a series of appearances for Disney impersonating Captain Jack Sparrow.
The Zonta Club of Bonita Springs’ popular Blue Ribbon pie baking contest returns. Eating contests include a hot dog eating contest for ages 13 and up sponsored by Russell’s Clambake, an ice cream eating contest for children eight and under sponsored by Royal Scoop, and new this year, a watermelon eating contest for children nine through 12.
Children’s games include a waterslide, water balloon toss, potato sack races, beach ball rolls and much more. Many trophies will be awarded.
Admission is free, and refreshments will be sold with a portion of the proceeds donated to the Bonita Assistance Office.
The artist cottages in the Liles Hotel plaza will be open. Riverside Park is located in the historic district of Bonita Springs on Old 41 and Pennsylvania Avenue. Guests are encouraged to bring their own lawn chairs, but to please leave their dogs and coolers at home.
For more information visit www.cityofbonitasprings.org or call 239-949-6262.
So a while back I’m at this party … when the room thinned out and got a little quieter “Rick” mentioned that he was on his way across town to sign some papers. As a matter of fact, it had just occurred to him that maybe he should run it by a real-a-tor since it involved real estate.
Insert sordid story about how wrong he was about his future Mrs. Right, who was just a Ms. Right-Now or something to that effect. As luck would have it (his words), they never did make it to the alter. A few years of playing house was just enough to help them wise up before they accidentally promised each other, “unto death do us part”.
In this fairy tale, everyone is deciding to go their separate ways peacefully which is a whole bunch better than the traditional ritual burning of clothing and keepsakes in the driveway. Things were going along so nicely, in fact, that the “She” in this situation has already found another love interest. She and her new Mr. Right-Now are planning on keeping house in the same house.
The only thing left to do is to do to tidy up this situation is to let “Rick” out of his obligations of ownership of the home since he won’t be living there any more. He decided to take the high road and not cause a stink over the home since it wasn’t a divorce and there were no kids involved.
It turns out that “Rick” is on his way to visit everyone involved in this three ring bees nest to sign off on a “quick claim deed” (his words) that She was nice enough to buy at Office Max or armchair-lawyer-dot-com. He wanted to know what I thought about the whole darn thing.
Obviously there must have been some little voice deep down inside that was telling him something was amiss. It only took a question or two to get back to the warm glow of they day when they were in l-o-v-e and buying a house together.
So I asked “Rick” a couple of questions like, did you pay for that home by obtaining a mortgage and did you maybe sign a whole bunch of paperwork and part of that could have been a promise to pay the lender back for the money you borrowed?
He sort of settled at a whole new level of quiet and then I ask the most important question, “Do you realize that you may be relinquishing ownership of that home by “quit claim” deed but you’re probably keeping the “note”, the promise to pay for it?” You might want to talk to an attorney, first.
Everyone may be amicable and maybe She will continue to make payments in a timely fashion and maybe it might never become a problem. That is, until “Rick” decides to buy another home and can’t qualify partly because he’s financially responsible for a home he’s no longer living in or because his credit was damaged post quit claim.
Let us now imagine how much fun that tale of woe is going to be for him to tell his next significant other he decides to venture into home ownership with. That’s generally when the note hits the fan.
Ya take the “L” out of lover and it’s over … unless there’s a note. When you cut those ties make sure you don’t get stuck paying for someone else’s love shack or render yourself less credit worthy because you’ve unwittingly left yourself strapped with invisi-debt simply by being a nice guy.