Tom Kelly: Second home? How to determine what you really can afford 

Thinking about buying that cabin in the woods your family enjoyed over the weekend?There are two ways for determining how much cash you can afford to put toward a second residence solely for your personal use or part-time rental.The first is the asset method. Start by taking stock of your present wealth. Create a balance …

$200 million later, why are St. Pete’s poor black neighborhoods worse off?

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 …

The many lives of the Versace mansion, a Miami Beach landmark

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 — …

Realtor couple take to heart the advice they give to clients when preparing their home for sale

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 …

Should you be a landlord in your retirement? – MarketWatch

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 …

The mall isn’t dead. It’s alive and well in Tampa’s Hyde Park Village | Tampa Bay Times

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 …