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* Sarasota Gulf Gates Woods home sets record and goes on the market for $499,000.
 

 
Two ducks sun themselves along a lake and preserver in Gulf Gate Woods. Sea otter, owls, ibises, egrets and other birds can often be spotted in the neighborhood.

built in the 1970's and are close to Siesta Key Beach, shopping, with a

A hawk takes flight in Gulf Gate Woods
 

library and golf course in the neighborhood along with lakes and open preserves.

ReMax Realtors gather for an 8:30 AM meeting to listen to the publisher of Our Town 50.

Strong Real Estate Market Expected for 20 years.

(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 15, 2003--The robust housing market has contributed 1.2 million new housing starts annually since 1998, and has provided a major boost for the U.S. economy in the last four years. This golden age of homebuilding is expected to continue its outstanding performance well into the third decade of this century, according to the new report, "The Housing Boom: Another 20 Years of Growth."
Authored by Al Ehrbar, a partner in Stern Stewart and Company, a global consulting firm headquartered in New York, the report takes issue with the many economists who fear that downward corrections in home values and a major reduction in construction activity lie ahead. While some decline in construction seems inevitable, most forecasters neglect some of the overwhelming positive factors that fueled the success of the new-home market in recent years.

"Demographics is the single most important element in the housing equation because the number of households create a floor and a ceiling on the number of housing units demanded," Ehrbar writes. "A careful weighing of the many variables -- immigration, the aging Baby Boomer demographic, affordability of housing -- influencing the housing industry strongly suggests that the new-home market will be enormously positive."

Demand for housing will be solid for the next 20 years. U.S. Census Bureau projections now indicate that the number of households will grow by nearly 24 million from 2000 through 2020, from 105 million to 129 million. That breaks down to 1.17 million new households a year in this decade and 1.2 million a year from 2010 to 2020.

"The true anomaly of the last 10 years was the strength of housing through the recession," Ehrbar observes. "The result was a radical new role for housing. Instead of adding to the severity of the recession, it helped sustain employment and consumption, and softened the economic landing. Housing went from being a safety valve at the inflationary peak of the cycle to acting as a safety net on the downside."

Immigration Fuels Housing Demand

In the future, the flow of new immigrants, along with the coming of age of the Echo-Boom generation (people born after 1976) will keep the supply of first-time homebuyers essentially constant through 2020. An increase in the number of immigrants, which Ehrbar believes could happen, would add substantially to starter-home demand.

The Great Baby Boomer Effect

The Baby Boomers coming of age in the 1970s produced the greatest decade of housing construction. Now their passage into their retirement years will have an equally profound effect on the types of housing demand. Their homes will be houses, not apartments, typically one-story with three bedrooms. Surprisingly, though, retirees do not trade down very far in size.

Trading Up for Bigger Homes

The youngest and most populous group of Boomers is still in their late 30s and early 40s, which means they are just moving into their prime trade-up years. The median age of buyers of upscale new homes is 45, versus a median age of 36 for all buyers. The households in the 35-to-44 bracket in 2000 - the core of this decade's trade-up market - outnumbered the older Boomers by more than 4 million, creating more demand for trade-up houses.

Housing has such a bright future because houses (and apartments) will continue to get bigger and better, ensuring that real, inflation-adjusted spending on residential construction will continue to rise.

"There will be ups and downs in housing, and the torrid pace of construction in 2002 will not continue. But the underlying trend is enormously positive. The most important fact for the housing industry is not the immediate outlook, but that it can look forward to at least 20 more years of what historically qualify as genuine boom times," concluded Ehrbar.

 

Re-modelers Seek Refuge
By Focusing on Garages
By JEFF ZASLOW

In the last few weeks, Wally Fisk has been spending a lot of time in his new garage. And why not? It has oak floors and room for five television sets, not to mention a ceramics workshop, an archery range and his prize 1932 Gar Wood speedboat. Oh, he has cars in there, too.

"My garage feels like home," says the retired construction-equipment maker, who actually spent Sept. 11 sitting in his boat watching the news.

He isn't the only one seeking refuge in his garage. With renovations on the rest of the house getting more expensive, more Americans are taking a new look at their oil-stained outbuildings. Some folks have turned them into everything from bars to basketball courts to survival centers -- and still have room for their cars. Others are employing fancy storage gizmos or new "mezzanines" for their junk. There is even a whole new coffee-table book on garages, which author Kira Obolensky dubs the home's "final frontier."

Bottom line: Business is up at garage remodelers all over the country, including Designer Doors, where sales of custom-made garage doors are up 25% this year. Recent events, which are keeping people at home more, have only speeded things up, particularly for businesses catering to the nervous. Web site Survival-center.com, for example, says its traffic has quadrupled since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., as consumers search out 55-gallon water drums and power generators for their garages.

Gussying up the garage isn't always as easy as it sounds. These are, after all, pretty basic structures, with concrete floors, thin walls and no plumbing or heating. Making one fit for human habitation can mean putting in everything from a floor to a heater, plus finding a way to co-exist with the cars. When Lynn Wadsworth and David Amdur moved to St. Paul, Minn., for instance, they spent $20,000 making their garage into an art studio as well (she is a sculptor; he is a painter). Once it was built, they found staring at the cars less than inspiring, so they put up a wall to hide them. The bigger problem: Though their garage is insulated, the high ceilings make it tough to warm up, so in the winter they have to turn on the heat an hour before they are ready to go out and work.

Where to Put the Stuff?

Then there is the question of where to put all the stuff that accumulates in garages -- lawn mowers, old refrigerators, boxes of clothes, unused exercise equipment. That problem has given birth to a whole garage-storage industry peddling everything from a pair of $12 "MultiStor" hanging brackets for lawn chairs and wheelbarrows to a $6,000 GarageTek system, which creates a mezzanine storage level, plus a workbench, cabinets, tool holders and 600 square feet of wall paneling. "Garage organization is now where closet organization was 20 years ago," says Marc Shuman, GarageTek's president.

For much of the '90s, the trend in garages was best described in one word: bigger. Of course, many Americans still want space big enough for a fleet of minivans. But they also want a place to work, to indulge their interests and even to entertain, all within the safety of their own homes. It's a lot cheaper to do all that in the garage than in the rest of the house: Builders and architects estimate that remodeling the garage costs between $25 and $100 a square foot. Redoing the inside of your house starts at about $100 a square foot and can go much higher.

It cost Arny and Gretchen Stromberg $20,000 to do the garage version of a teardown, demolishing their old detached structure and building what appears to be a cute, brick house in its place, complete with windows, shutters and a white front door flanked by flower boxes. Now, just for fun, they invite neighbors over to press their garage door opener. The entire brick front of the little house lifts up to reveal their cars. The Lexington, Ky., couple are quick to point out that after the makeover the appraisal on their property jumped to $250,000 from $199,000. "Most garages are ugly and monstrous-looking," Mrs. Stromberg says. "A garage doesn't have to be that way."

Mortgage banker Bob Sheets spent a hefty $40,000 to turn his Minnesota garage into a "drive-in sports bar," including antique bricks from a demolished Chicago warehouse, recessed lighting, a stereo system, two televisions, a 1940s Texaco gas pump and 60 neon signs. He says it was money well spent. "I'd rather have friends over for a party in my garage than go out to a bar somewhere," he says.

Steel Mesh and Display Boards

Still, many suburbanites continue to want a big box, not just for parking, but for all their junk. That's why almost 17% of new homes built last year had garages that could fit three or more cars, up from 12% in 1993, according to the National Association of Homebuilders. For people who still can't squeeze their cars in among the excess stuff, Bill West, a Fort Collins, Colo., real-estate agent, has published "Your Garagenous Zone," a book filled with such garage advice as, "if it's on the floor, it's time to store." Among his recommendations: steel mesh affixed to the ceiling for heavy objects such as snow tires and display boards like the ones retailers use for hanging items.

The fact is, once people have redone the kitchen and the bath, there isn't much of the house left to redo, making the garage a prime target for the remodeling industry. Older baby boomers are "finishing up inside their homes and moving on" to the garage, says Greg Alford of the Peachtree Consulting Group, of Atlanta, which recently studied Americans' garage spending.

Some people are even blending their homes and garages. Car collector Jim Hull, a retired designer of children's furniture, recently sold his Brentwood, Calif., home and 14-car garage. He had a hydraulic lift in his living room where, for parties, he would display such classics as his 1965 Ferrari. "Cars are like works of art," he says. "Why not display them in your home?" His new house in Malibu will include a living room capable of displaying five cars, and a 5,000-square-foot garage with second-floor guest quarters. Dinner will be served on a balcony overlooking his sea of cars.

Meanwhile Mr. Sheets, who turned his garage into a sports bar, says his wife always knows where to find him. "My view of the world is that a man's garage is his castle," he says. "You have the house attached for resale."



 

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Total...........71.5 million
Source: Visit Florida

How Kitchen Fixes
Can Add Up Fast

I blame the siren song of the Sub-Zero refrigerator for the ultimate irony of my home-renovation project: I have bought $10,000 worth of some of the finest appliances -- even though my greatest talent in the kitchen is my razor-sharp ability to order up a delivery meal in minutes.

Nearing the end of a nine-month-long renovation of my Victorian home in San Francisco, I thought buying appliances would be, comparatively, a breeze. After all, the original owners, in 1864, made do with a coal stove and outdoor "cooler" room. But it turned out to be nearly as complicated as redoing the brick foundation or replacing the lathe and plaster walls. And at $4,435, the 30-inch built-in Sub-Zero, a now-ubiquitous symbol of yuppiedom, was probably the most illogical purchase yet in my seemingly endless home-improvement project.

In fact, I took my calculator out the other day and did the math. If I kept the same serviceable set of basic appliances that were in place when I started ripping down the walls last year, I could afford about 1,000 takeout meals or at least 600 outings at pretty good restaurants.

Still, there was some reasoning behind the splurge. A dated kitchen is a killer on resale, real-estate experts say, while kitchen renovations typically offer among the highest returns of any home-improvement project. According to industry experts, a major kitchen redo returns 71% of a homeowner's investment; in a hot real-estate market like San Francisco's it almost always pays for itself in full.

I remember well the appliance-snobbery factor from the yearlong search for my house; I overheard a lot of chatter in the open houses I visited every weekend. Of all the various comments from other home-seekers (including my personal favorite, "I hate this place, let's make a bid on it immediately before we lose it") most interest centered on appliances. And they'd better be up to par. "A Kenmore?" said one house hunter, with wrinkle-nosed disdain, to her husband. "Isn't that like your grandmother's?"

Don't Forget to Haggle

Before getting into specifics, try to keep a number of things in mind when shopping for appliances. First, make sure to ask for discounts if you're buying a whole set of appliances rather than just one. By going to several places for quotes, I managed to save $1,500. This took some haggling -- I employed the tried-and-true technique of holding brochures from competing retailers in my hand while talking to a salesperson. Simple advice: Do not take the first offer and don't forget to ask about other fees that might be added later, like a charge for actually carrying your fridge up the stairs.

Second, remember that there are a lot of extra costs when purchasing appliances, including possibly having to upgrade gas and electric lines, as well as making sure your plumbing is up to snuff. I had to redo all the major systems in my house, including replacing thin, old, rusty pipes with gleaming copper lines, making my expensive new appliances even more expensive.

Refrigerators: All kinds of gizmos here. Do you want side-by-side doors, built-in ice dispensers, or Web access? (Sorry, that's available only in Japan.) I opted for a model that had the freezer on the bottom, a feature that appliance dealers I talked to said is making a comeback. Another new trend is glass-faced refrigerators, but I didn't care to share evidence of last night's Chinese-food binge with guests.

Freestanding refrigerators come with much lower price tags, from $900 to $2,000. I also looked at several comparable built-in models, from KitchenAid, Viking and General Electric, all of which cost about $1,000 to $2,000 less than the Sub-Zero. But what can I say? Though it was far more expensive, I was a sucker for the looks of the stainless steel god.

Stoves: At the high end, price differences aren't as stark in this area, especially as compared with refrigerators. I looked at a bunch of different makes of "professional" stoves whose marketing ploy seems to be: "If you can't cook, you can look like you can," including Viking, Thermador and KitchenAid. Some of these brands included convection ovens.

I opted for a 30-inch, four-burner in the Wolf line -- which, in fact, was bought by Sub-Zero last year -- mostly because it had the cleanest-looking lines and the simplest features. It cost $2,775. Sales people failed to convince me that I needed a grill or rotisserie, features that other ranges offered; those frills seemed useless for most of the time, and hard to clean. One thing to keep in mind when pricing stoves is the need for a hood, duct cover and riser (that sits on the back of a slide-in stove to protect the wall). These items added about $1,600 to the price of my stove.

Dishwashers: By this time, I was a sitting duck to the appliance dealer, who steered me right past the basic white dishwashers -- ranging in price from $400 to $600 -- to the fancier stainless-steel ones with the slick look I was clearly going for. I shelled out $780 for a Bosch model, which had deep, open racks and is so quiet that it's hard to know when it is on. Best of all, it has controls that are built into the top edge of the door, so the sleek front finish is entirely blank. For a minimalist like me, it's appliance nirvana.

Other: As you might imagine, there are now tons of other appliances you can add to the mix, most of which I passed on. I decided against one of those instant hot-water devices that most sinks are now equipped with (I can boil water all by myself) and also a trash compactor, another appliance that is becoming de rigueur. For me, it seemed like a waste of space that could better be used for storage. Ditto a wine cooler, food warmer, and refrigerated drawers (handy for soft drinks, they tell me). I did buy a garbage disposal -- like most new ones, it has the on/off button directly on the countertop rather than those old wall switches. I am using my old microwave, adding a new shelf in the cabinets to house it, which saved me a grand total of $90.

Maybe I'll use that windfall as a down payment on a British-made Dualit four-slice toaster, a stainless-steel beauty that I fell in love with on a recent trip to Europe. At about $400, it's a pretty silly purchase to be considering.

Then again, I'm told it is the Sub-Zero of toasters.
 

Retirement Living Guide

Beneva Park Club- Beneva Road
Louise Page (941) 316-0151

Kobernick House - Honore
Nan Futernick (941) 377-0781

Anchin Pavilion - Honore
Kathy Van Dusen (941) 379-3553