Life In Bonita Springs

In Southwest Florida Fall Means Festivals

There is almost always something to do in Bonita Springs but this weekend was ridiculous with the events on schedule which included Riverfest and the Swamp Buggy Parade just down the road in Naples, Florida. 

October and November are usually the kick off of “tourist season” and then we follow up with holiday, uh Christmas, events.  It’s a few months of action packed weekends after a long hot summer.

I’m a little late making announcements … I do have a real  job and that is sort of keeping me busy these days.  Please don’t tell big media before you get your deal, because they think that Florida real estate has gone to hell in a hand basket and they keep singing that tune. 

This weekend is Halloween weekend, on top off it all.  Most importantly, if you’re a last minute “looking for trick or treat” person, Sunday October 31, 2010 at Riverside Park is a trick or treat event put on by the Bonita Springs Estero Association of Realtors, which starts at 6:00 p.m.

The next big event in Bonita Springs will be Taste of Bonita 2010 at Riverside Park.  You can get more info here:

Taste of Bonita 2010 | Bonita Springs, Florida

See you around town!  Enjoy the pictures from Riverfest 2010 in the photo album below.

View Full Album

When Something Better Comes Along

The interesting thing about shopping for real estate is that when the searching and shopping is over, when the contract is executed the home buying systems are still engaged. The systems and the automated searches and notifications set up to send buyers new listings, price reductions and properties that go back on market are still up and running.

Every day, with the morning coffee or the evening cocktail the buyer sits down, reads their email and gets the automated email that reads “X new listings that meet your criteria” are new and waiting to be seen. Literally, months can go by with a buyer watching homes go by if they’re waiting for word on their own short sale transaction.

While a portion of buyers that write a contract on real estate stick with the one they picked there are some folks out there who have the temptation to change houses mid stream. Sometimes it’s a twinge of buyer’s remorse or even the “grass is greener on the other side” theory.

Simply being tired of waiting isn’t a good enough reason to walk away from a contract any more than something better coming up.

Believe it or not there are buyers who have asked “have you heard anything on the approval” a week into a short sale. They’ve tired of the agonizing seven day wait. I guess the anticipation of expected wait is amplified and sometimes the American microwave mentality just can’t take it.

Every once in a while there is a unique opportunity for something better. A new listing actually can show up that is better than what was contracted on; lower price, better view, more upgrades or better closing terms which may include a glimmer of light over a closing table at the end of the tunnel.

In some troubled neighborhoods one of the nearly identical short sales a buyer looked at could be on the market several weeks later as a foreclosure. In the eyes of a buyer, that turns it from a big maybe to a near definite in terms of closing viability.

Obviously buyers created a plan getting into a contract on a property so if they’ve had a change of heart they should make sure they plan to get out of a property the proper way, to. The right way is without complicating their lives with legal woes because they didn’t honor their contractual obligations or properly leverage their contingencies to be able to cancel the contract.

Terminating a purchase agreement is an action that calls for legal advice not a guess at what a buyer thinks is the legal way to do it… or just by walking away or ignoring the transaction because something better came along.

Professional advice usually pays for itself so what’s a small charge for proper legal counsel especially if you’re a buyer who wants to terminate a contract for something that is considered a better value, anyway?

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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.

The Downtown Landmark of Old Bonita Springs

The Banyan Tree has been around since 1921.  It was planted when Bonita Springs had a boom to the area in the late 1920’s.  It’s been standing tall ever since.  It’s across the street from the Riverside Park Band Shell and beside the Bonita Springs Community Center. 

The day I took this picture of the Banyan Tree I had met up with student nurses from FGCU who were helping Cafe of Life serve meals.  One of those nurses was my daughter who is almost twenty-three years old now.  I remember her climbing this banyan tree when she was very little.  Most kids remember climbing the Banyan Tree.  The picture doesn’t do justice to the enormity of it.

There is a long branch that points away in the picture.  It points out toward a covered seating area at Riverside Park.  I can tell you that the student nurse, when she was around five or six years old shinnied all the way out there.  It’s pretty far, pretty high and quite a feat.  What she wasn’t counting on when she got out there was a squirrel who was in panic mode, moving the opposite direction.

It was pretty funny and the squirrel would have run past her or under her on the bottom side of the branch but she panicked and jumped for her life.  Fortunately, I caught her because I’d been watching the whole thing.  That was probably the last day she climbed the Banyan Tree.  I should have made her face her fears after she was done with Cafe of Life.

If you’d like to see the Banyan Tree, it’s at the corner of Old 41 Road and Reynolds Street.  If you stop by on a Wednesday ask one of the Volunteers at Cafe of Life how you can get involved. They could always use an extra set of helping hands.

Get My Real Estate Off of Your Website

In the last decade, shopping for real estate has been revolutionized. At the finger tips of most consumers are the listings of most homes in southwest Florida or anywhere in the world for that matter.

There are a series of events that occur when real estate gets listed. A good portion of it revolves around listing the property on the internet and syndicating the data to portals that consumers use to gather their information.

Some of these times the sites are IDX, which stands for "Internet Data Exchange". You may have seen it also called Broker Reciprocity. It means that the brokerages are cooperating to display each others listings on other websites, usually with some form of eye strain print, recognition to the listing brokerage.

Some of the time the sites are syndication partners and highly popular sites like Zillow, Trulia and a couple of dozen of other up and coming platforms. The fact of the matter is that once the listing is uploaded to the internet it can literally be in dozens of places with a click of the mouse. It’s not “Duke Thesis” viral but it does spread fast.

As with anything, with the good comes the bad. It’s not just the syndication partners that will host the information. Once in a while a “scraper site” will gather (steal) information and bits of the listing or a blog post about it, especially if it has valuable or popular key words in the text.

The purpose of a scraper site is to gather and display data which will attract web searchers and then the site hopes to earn revenue from ad campaigns on the web page.

This is the data the brokerages and agents usually do not have control of. It’s a form of electronic plagiarism for money. These spammy sites are frowned upon and often illegal but they’re kind of like that “putting a note in someone’s mailbox without a stamp” kind of illegal. Nobody is generally standing around with a set of cuffs policing the web.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, a consumer has since purchased the property and finds it listed for sale somewhere in the great blue yonder. There’s a scrap of data clinging to it with a link (to me) or an agent name, who they subsequently contact to demand retraction of the listing and justice for their pain and suffering.

Having searched front back and sideways trying to find a glimpse of whatever is “out there” about this property, it was never found again.

The irony is that the original owners of the property and their team of lawyers were so difficult to work with we’d parted ways some time ago. I thought we’d gained as much distance between us as possible. Spammy McSpamster, whether he’s an enterprising teen in Tulsa or a professional spammer in Bangalore, fixed that.

So, here’s the long and the short of finding things on the web about real estate whether you’re a buyer, seller, property owner or prior owner. If you find something you have problems with or even a home that you need to get more information about copy the URL of the website you’ve found it to accompany your request. Just because it was on the web doesn’t mean the agent put it there or has access to that particular web site.

The web is a pretty big hay stack. If the agent can’t find it then they can’t help get it corrected or removed, either.

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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.

Bundled and Equity Golf & Country Club Real Estate

Unlike most real estate agents I have enjoyed the unique experience of being and early adopter and early adapter of technology, social media and internet related marketing.  Occasionally, I’ve been consulted by a few businesses, including country club golf course communities, about getting the word out to the public that they were healthy and financially stable, as well as, communities that needed help cleaning up their reputation online and with the public.

The economy has been rough on some of the country club communities and they’ve had to champion their way out of financial stresses, developer abandonment or bankruptcy and prove they’re healthy even when they don’t have issues because the real estate buying public is worried about buying into someone else’s problems.

The owners and members of the communities are reaching out for help and doing their best to bring in real estate agents and share their renovations, updates and financial stability records.  I’ve attended a few of these sorts of events. 

Today I was present at a meeting where the director explained that out of the eight hundred front doors (homes and condos) that there were only forty-four listings on the market, four active with contingencies and one pending sale.  He boasted an only 6% list rate.  Out of curiosity I double checked those figures in the MLS and he was right.  Even though there aren’t many home and condos pending sale, there is a low list rate.

What this fella didn’t realize is that by using the same figures an absorption rate for the community could be calculated to help all of those eight hundred home owners fully understand that if they’re trying to sell their real estate, right now, today, the estimated time frame to sell is fourteen months.  (Six months is considered a balanced market, so that’s a heavy buyers market.)

Now, doesn’t that change the perspective of being a home seller in that community?  I thought so, too.

Read also: So, What Is The Absorption Rate For Your Bonita Springs Home?

The absorption rate calculation is a great tool that both buyers and sellers of real estate need to use.  Until today, I didn’t realize that country clubs and bundled golf course communities should be using it, too, so that they fully understand exactly how long current home sellers could be waiting for a buyer to walk thru the door.

This is especially important for distressed home sellers who are not making the home owner association payment.  The balance of the home owners are often left to pick up the slack. 

Those association or country club managers may want to fully understand how long they’re going to have to pick up someone else’s slack.

It’s Almost Like She’s Smiling

Halloween Megastore Moves into Blockbuster Building 2010

The Halloween store was only here for one year, 2010.  This space is now Royal Shell Real Estate.

It’s worth a trip up there just too see how many costumes and Halloween related items they jammed in this store.  If you’re looking for it, it’s probably in there.

The Halloween Megastore is located in the old Blockbuster Video Building on US 41/Tamiami Trail Bonita Springs, Fl in the same plaza with Target and Publix.  Yes, the same Publix I will soon be the mayor of … again … on Foursquare.

Halloween is just around the corner so I thought I’d let you know this costume and Halloween shop snuck into town so you can gear up for Trick or Treat.

Things to Do in Bonita Springs, Free Even

For whatever reason, I’ve been fascinated with this secret cypress preserve for years.  It’s located just a couple of hundred feet off of Tamiami Trail.  Thousands of people drive by it every day and don’t even know its there.  I stop and visit it when i pick up or drop off my dry cleaning.

In reality it is a boardwalk that connects two of the Bernwood office complexes, not a city or county park.  The area is a wetland preserve so there is standing water, cypress trees, all sorts of birds and a feeling of being in a park without a big hike involved.

Since there is a boardwalk, if you’re dealing with strollers or folks who have a hard time making it around physically. The walk is short and the path is smooth.  It would probably be walker or wheelchair friendly, too.  It’s perfect if you have little ones with a short attention span or someone who just wants to see a bit of nature without an all day trip to The Sanctuary in Naples.  It’s a 15 minute walk and it’s free.

If you’re thinking of checking it out the easiest way to find it is to look for One Price Dry Cleaners which is located at the middle gate of Pelican Landing in Bonita Springs.  Just before the gate there is a brick building on the left.  It’s behind that building.  Park by the cleaners and you’ll be closest.  Be very quiet and you might see the nesting hawks.  Here’s a map to the boardwalk at 25091 Bernwood Dr, Bonita Springs, Fl  34134.

Flesher Farm Will Have Holiday Lights 2010

Once a month, on Friday morning the Bonita Springs Association of Realtors hosts a breakfast meeting for members and affiliates.  Our meeting was held at Worthington Golf and Country Club this month and on my way I cut down Bonita Grande Road.  I always try to get a look at The Horses at Flesher Farm.

As I drove by, I realized that their mailbox was an opportunity to talk about Flesher Farm and wonder aloud if they’re having Christmas lights and holiday activities. 

Since my twins were little squirts we’d visit the Flesher Farm and buy “reindeer food” to leave by the tree for Santa Claus.  The light displays went on for years.  There were a few years taken off and last year the Flesher Farm put lights up again.

Updated:  Fleshers are having a Christmas light display this year, 2010.

If you hear anything about a Flesher Farm Christmas light display being planned, let me know.  If you’re wondering where the Flesher Farm is located, it’s on Bonita Grande Road very near Bonita Beach Road.  Here’s a map of the area just in case there is a light show on the way … or if you just want to drive by and see Linda’s horses swishin’ their tails and grazin’.