News about properties and real estate
The predominantly black, high-poverty neighborhoods south of Central Avenue have long attracted politicians courting voters with plans to turn them around.Improving the neighborhoods he dubbed Midtown was key to former Mayor Rick Baker’s vision in 2001 of a “Seamless City” where persistent racial and economic inequities would melt away. Thirteen years later, newly elected Mayor …
Continue reading “$200 million later, why are St. Pete’s poor black neighborhoods worse off?”
If you own a home worth $1 million, would it ever make sense to take out a reverse mortgage?The question arises because the maximum amounts that can be drawn on a home equity conversion mortgage – the type of reverse mortgage program available through the federal government – are based on the lower of appraised …
Passing through Miami to Cuba in the early 1990s, luxury fashion designer Gianni Versace asked his cab driver to show him something “fancy and fun about Miami.”The cab driver chose South Beach. After a few minutes at the News Cafe, Versace saw something akin to the zeitgeist of Saint-Tropez and Capri during the 1970s — …
Continue reading “The many lives of the Versace mansion, a Miami Beach landmark”
Realtor/homeowner Patricia Hanly has a collection of 350 teapots, most of them English and nearly all bought from the potters who crafted them in various villages all over Great Britain. She’s reluctantly packed away all but about a dozen in preparation for the sale of her cottage-style home on Bougainvillea Street in Sarasota. She and …
In 2005, everyone I knew was buying real estate. With no experience and no money, they bought properties they couldn’t afford and were convinced they were going to make a fortune.Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way, and most of them now have a foreclosure or short sale in their past.Does that make real estate …
Continue reading “Should you be a landlord in your retirement? – MarketWatch”
Its charming open-air streets and slew of high end restaurants and boutiques made it the shopping destination in the entire Tampa Bay region. But when International Plaza opened in 2001, it took many of Hyde Park’s long-standing tenants with it. The village struggled for years as new owners came and went without investing much in …