Problem #2: Listen to our clients. This property, bordering Frederick Small Road, was listed for 970 days by another realtor. When we were called in, we needed to analyze why 329 Eagle Drive not selling.
Lichtenstein Solution #2: Ask the owners what they loved about their home. The owners told us that the feedback they received was that the noise of Frederick Small Road and bordering a wall for a view was holding back offers. However, they loved the privacy and depth of the backyard.
Problem #3: Turn the noise issue from a negative to a positive.
Lichtenstein Solution #3: There is nothing you can do about bordering Frederick Small Road. Cars and trucks go by. It is what it is. However, noise can be minimized. We asked the owner to install an attractive waterfall by the pool. Like good clients, they did. The waterfall did two things. First, it looked great. They wished they had done it before! Secondly, it brought natural soothing sounds which smoothed out the road noise from Frederick Small Road by 50%. Turn a negative into a positive!
329 Eagle Drive – Before Waterfall
329 Eagle Drive – After Waterfall
Problem #4: Market the Land.
Lichtenstein Solution #4: The property is situated on nearly ½ an acre. Using a low-level aerial photographer, we took an aerial of the property which highlighted the wraparound side part of property. Perfect for kids, dog owners or for gardening. We used the aerial as the highlight for marketing materials, as this showed the full ½ acre.
Problem #1: This property, a Mustapik new construction just off the 11th tee and NOT on the water, was listed for 1214 days by another realtor.
Lichtenstein Solution #1: Find the buyer.
Result #1: We did, and a successful sale.
Problem #2: Shortly thereafter, the buyers missed their close friends in Vero Beach and felt they had made a mistake. They called us, told us they had already purchased another home in Vero Beach, and asked us to resell their home. What we were to learn shortly thereafter was that their interior decorator had moved out all of the valuable artwork, accessories, bedspreads, etc., and took them to Vero and left us with an unappealing shell.
Lichtenstein Solution #2: We were quite shaken when we discovered this, called the owner and told him that his interior designer had just reduced the value of his home by $500,000! We strongly recommended that we call in our interior designer and come up with a budget to make the home extremely attractive so that a buyer would have to do nothing more than bring their wardrobe and toothbrush.
The owner gave us the go-ahead and both Jeff and Cary were intimately involved in the process of staging this house for sale. Combined, we have over 40 years of experience in the fabrics business, attending furniture shows twice a year, designing for and selling to over 400 furniture manufactures annually. Decorating for us is a great change of pace and we know instinctively how to make a house have universal appeal.
We timed our open house for December 1st when most of the snowbirds were visiting to get maximum exposure.
Result #2: We received an offer within 11 days and closed 2 weeks later so the new owner could have it for the season. Not only did we sell it, but we achieved $500 per square foot for property NOT on the water. It was a high price for a home NOT on the water, but it was also new construction, fully furnished, so it was a fair price for both the buyer and seller.
What is the difference between a ´Second Home´ and a home in ´Second Life´? There is a world of difference.
Palm Beach Gardens real estate is some of the finest in the country. Golf courses dot the landscape and estate homes are nestled among the perfectly manicured fairways and greens. Wading birds patrolling the edge of lakes complete this scene. If golf is not your thing, we have condos along the water on Singer Island or in Jupiter and Juno Beach, both just 10 minutes from Palm Beach Gardens. You could pick out a great second home in either of these environments. So what is this home in ´Second Life´ about?
´Second Life´ is the virtual world where millions of people are spending their time in an imaginary world, including buying and selling real estate with ´Linden Dollars´. You can do anything you want in this digital world, from buying real estate to having an affair. You think I’m kidding? This is serious business.
People are buying ´Linden Dollars´ with real money and then use these Linden dollars to purchase homes in Second Life. Or to buy furnishings, paint, textures and window coverings. Conversely, you can buy and sell with Linden dollars then convert them back to currency and make money. And if you think playing around in a digital world is just for kids, think again. IBM is into Second Life in a big way!
They have created their own virtual world where sales teams meet in their digital personas, called avatars. Sam Palmisano, Chairman and CEO, has two avatars, one in casual dress and the other in a dark suit with starched white shirt. And these global sales teams have never met in person; they co-mingle in a digital world. And when you get hired, they train you in how to exist in this new world and how to fly your avatar around without running into walls.
So if the tough economy is making it hard to own a second home, maybe you would consider a home in Second Life. Oh, if you want to look for a digital home here, you will have to find an avatar real estate agent, not me.
Nobody would deny that the residential real estate market in South Florida has been turbulent the last few years. If you were living here during the boom, you might remember people camping out in order to get a new condo or townhouse in a development opening for sale. Lotteries were held since there were too many buyers for the available units.
Even many real estate agents found themselves caught up in the frenzy and bought homes or condos on speculation. But, as in the children’s game of musical chairs, when the music stopped in 2006 many people were left without a chair to sit in. And to deal with the new financial mess, people suddenly found themselves in new circumstances and many people did novel things and some new real estate terms joined the lexicon.
For example, ‘blurry title’ and ‘strategic default’ are now common terms.
We also have new uses for houses. Adverse possession or ‘squatters’ are back, as are shifty types trying to make a quick buck off the situation. And now a more common use of foreclosed houses is to turn them into ‘grow houses’. A grow house is a building that is converted into an indoor growing space for the cultivation of marijuana. Why?
The current street value of pot, according to Google, is several thousand dollars per pound. And with California and Colorado legalizing the medical use of the herb, the demand is soaring. On a CNBC special, they interviewed a grower in California who had some really large plants that he said might be worth thousands per plant. So with all these empty, bank-owned houses, some are being turned into ‘grow houses’, another new phrase enters the language and the real estate market continues to change and we now have the new normal.
This Aurora Award winning Mizner/Tuscan custom estate home at 462 Mariner Drive in Admirals Cove in Jupiter, Florida sits just seconds from the Intracoastal Waterway. Awarded the Finest Home in 17 Southeastern States Award, it is a collaboration of the owners, architects, builder, landscape architect, and interior design firm. The owners worked with all four firms, inspiring and challenging them to create an Old-World Romantic Florida Home with a charm and casualness that separates it from the expected and puts it in a class by itself. The article below is reprinted with the permission of Architectural Digest.
It is a house that opens up slowly and reveals itself in layers. Even from a distance, the house has a certain presence. It is rich yellow, a hue that pales only in the fiercest Florida sunlight; at other times it gleams gold, almost the color of van Gogh’s haystacks. Four stately palms stand sentinel, lining the drive.
Wrought iron gates lead to the Chicago-brick courtyard with a decorative arch that links the wings of the house.
The house was built in 1999, but its thickly textured walls are already showing the patina of age. The terra-cotta tiles on the roof have a worn, seasoned look. This is a Florida house — a weekend and winter vacation retreat — for a couple enchanted by Provence and Tuscany and lured by the romantic feel of old Palm Beach. It is not in Palm Beach, however, but in Jupiter, just 15 miles away, and it takes its inspiration from both distant and regional architectural antecedents.
The owners wanted the conveniences of life in the late 20th century but with the intricate layout of a much older house. After all, many Palm Beach houses of the 1920s were designed to seem much older, as if they were Italian palazzo or Spanish villas that had magically materialized in America. From the start, architect Spencer Goliger and designer Marc Thee of the famed Marc-Michaels firm had to meet twin mandates: to make the house both informal and formal. “We wanted to capture the essence of Palm Beach without imitating it,” says Goliger.
In most minds, Palm Beach’s architecture is inextricably connected to Addison Mizner, who began designing there around the end of the First World War. By mixing sources from Moorish Spain, Renaissance Italy and 18th century France, he created a style that was all its own. But for this house, both architect and clients looked not so much to Mizner’s exuberant houses as to the more restrained work of Maurice Fatio, the Swiss-born American architect who designed numerous local houses in the 1920s and 1930s for such clients as Harold S. Vanderbilt and Joseph E. Widener.
“They wanted it to be elegant but not opulent,” says the Palm Beach-based Goliger, who, in addition to Thee of Marc-Michaels Interior Design, worked with landscape architect Krent Wieland. Goliger created rooms that have both warmth and grand proportions and Thee completed them.
Coffered wood ceilings are adapted from Fatio’s designs but are kept lighter in tone. Checkerboard travertine floors hark back to European villas, but the hues of the stone are warmer, a cream and a chocolate brown. The cast-stone living room fireplace draws on historic prototypes, but it is not copied from a specific source. As in a typical Palm Beach house, there are cast-stone columns, balustrades and urns. “We wanted to make sure we respected both authenticity and good design,” Thee says. Landscape Architect Wieland gave the property the look and lushness of a tropical paradise with hibiscus, bougainvillea and palms.
It is an episodic house. The light varies, sometimes rather dramatically, from room to room. The spaces take unexpected shapes: The dining room is oval; the master suite has a hexagonal sitting room; the living room is taller than it is wide or long; the entrance hall is a rotunda. The oculus-topped space, Goliger says, “is reminiscent of the entrance to a grand Palm Beach house.”
It opens onto a gallery, which in turn leads in one direction to the living room and in the other to the dining room. A grand circular staircase with wrought iron rail leads to a rather romantic bridge; even the faux-bronze railing offers glimpses into the 1st-floor rooms and a long view out across the pool and vine-entwined pergola to the deepwater canal beyond.
Throughout the house the colors shift almost imperceptibly. “I started with cream and a buttery yellow and then layered onto that celadons and mustards,” Thee says.
A bit removed from the whirl of Palm Beach, the house is an ode to historic Florida architecture. Some houses are intended to take the breath away, “showcase moments,” as Thee calls them. “This one,” he says, “is about texture and a mix of elegance and rustication. But it’s a progression; nothing is too contrived. Aurora Judge George Matarasso said “I just had to clap my hands and say that was really well done.”
Finally, Aurora Judge Susan Jenkins, senior editor of Builder Magazine commented, “This one was just perfect the whole way through.”
A perfect example of the finest of Jupiter homes for sale.
329 Eagle Drive – Before Waterfall
329 Eagle Drive – After Waterfall
