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.
Charl Schwartzel, 26 years of age, 2011 Masters Champion, currently renting in Ray Floyd’s Community, Old Palm in Palm Beach Gardens, will most probably buy a home there along with 21-year-old phenomenon, Rory McElroy. Both players spent the weeks prior to the Masters honing their games on Floyd’s masterpiece.
Exclusive to Old Palm is their unique 3-hole practice course with over a dozen tees and their state-of-the-art indoor/outdoor teaching facility at the adjacent driving range. The original developer, along with Floyd, had a unique vision. They purchased a parcel across the road from Old Palm, tunneled under the road and connected the 2 properties, giving Old Palm 21 holes of golf.
In their teaching facility, cameras are situated above, behind, in front and in the rear, to record every possible angle of the student’s swing. Playback can be done in super-slow-motion to dissect even the most minute flaw that the naked eye cannot see. Schwartzel availed himself of this in the weeks prior, making sure his takeaway was not too flat so as not to turn the ball over to the left in flight.
Charl Schwartzel's Rental Home in Old Palm
Old Palm Entrance
Old Palm Clubhouse Aerial
Old Palm Entry Gate
Old Palm Golf Course & Clubhouse
Old Palm Clubhouse
Old Palm | Tunnel to 3 Practice Holes
Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens are now home to 15 Augusta Green Jacket winners including Tiger Woods (4), Jack Nicklaus (6), Raymond Floyd (1), Gary Player (3), as well as other star athletes like Michael Jordon. Jordan and Ernie Els reside at the The Bear’s Club, Robert Allenby at Admirals Cove, Greg Norman, Gary Player and Lee Trevino on Jupiter Island, while Jack Nicklaus is at Lost Tree Village in North Palm Beach.
Tiger Woods New Jupiter Island Estate | CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE!
Ernie Els Bear's Club Estate
Michael Jordan's Bear's Club Estate | CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE!
Old Palm is the newest of the gated communities and recently changed hands. One interesting fact is that Charl Schwartzel’s manager put together the group that recently purchased it, and many players from Scotland and Ireland can been seen renting, playing and dining there on a daily basis.
Old Palm is a high-end gated community, currently with 34 homes for sale as well as undeveloped vacant land. Starter prices for homes are just under $1m and the highest price for a listed home is $7,500,000 for 10,448 square feet.
Jeff & Cary Lichtenstein are Realtors with Illustrated Properties and Christie’s International Real Estate. They market homes for sale in Old Palm, Admirals Cove, Mirasol, and The Bear’s Club. Cary Lichtenstein, formerly a 4-handicap golfer, used to rate courses for GolfWeek magazine and has lived in Admirals Cove for the past 17 years.
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.
The thermometers took another nasty dip last night as our second really cold spell of the year marches through. Fortunately, these don’t last long, and of course, compared to what is happening along the Atlantic coast, we can really appreciate the spectacular weather we enjoy here during the winter months.
Our season starts in November and lasts until April, and except for these few cold days, it is the perfect place to play golf or go sailfishing.
Our cold spells usually only last 2-3 days and then the wind comes off the ocean again and warms things up. But last year, things were different. We had the coldest winter on record in Florida; not the single coldest night, but the coldest average temperature over the three months of winter. And although many types of palms have become acclimated to our area, last year we actually lost some very large palms.
We can, of course, cover our smaller plants and flowers to protect them from frost and bring in our hanging plants and family pets. But these tall palms standing fully exposed to the harsh wind could not endure.
So when the temperature dropped again into the low 30s, I spoke with a locally-renowned arborist about the state of things this year. He confirmed that although the temperatures have been low, they have not stayed low for so many nights and this is well within the tolerance of our trees. On a more technical level, he also recommended adding a copper fungicide rinse to the bud, but that’s another story.
The loss of a stately palm or other large tree can have a devastating effect on the value of a home on the market. Home values can be greatly enhanced by large and beautiful trees and the loss of one or more can change the whole presentation of a home to prospective buyers. But all in all, this year’s freezing weather is not as bad as last year.
329 Eagle Drive – Before Waterfall
329 Eagle Drive – After Waterfall
