I guess we all have our stories about blowing opportunities to buy at the beaches. You’d think that, since we’re smart enough to have a license, we’d be smart enough to know a good investment.
Mine is the Ponte Vedra club condo for $83,000 about 10 years ago. Yours is a lot bigger, I assume, and everyone has a story that starts something like this: “I could have bought that piece of property back in 1980 for (you fill in the blank) and last month it sold for (you fill in the blank.)”
We all should have seen it coming. It’s going to keep coming, too. The fact that it’s sold out doesn’t mean anything; a friend of mine is tearing down his oceanfront home to build another, and he isn’t alone.
A decade or so ago, we all looked at the Jacksonville beaches as being somewhat on the riff-raff side, except for a few spots in the Selva Marina area. Mayport Road was about as lousy as it gets in Florida, and Jacksonville Beach looked like what it was: a crummy community run by small-town people.
It’s all hot stuff today. It’s probably because Ponte Vedra overflowed, though I’m sure the current crop of politicians will claim otherwise, and today the sweep has gone north with the power of a tidal wave. The little mom-and-pop motels are gone or going, replaced by tall condos.
The remaining land is either unavailable (city property, etc.) or presently unattractive, but its time will come. The hill in Jacksonville Beach is gradually being nibbled away by upscale housing and Mayport Road, once a tawdry collection of trailers and hoochie-kootchie joints, is taking on the appearance of just another piece of suburbia.
The second section of this issue has stories about the Jacksonville beaches area and what’s happened in the last decade or so. We talked to people outside our industry and, while we didn’t find anything very astonishing, it all reaffirms what we know — that the beaches aren’t housing much riff-raff these days.
Our industry has been part of this growth. With the coming of upscale folks to the area above Ponte Vedra, the real estate community didn’t sit back and think about the past. (Duh ... a commission on a $600,000 property beats a commission on a $100,000 property almost all the time, doesn’t it?)
They’ve been aided by excellent work by the real estate association’s Beach office and a big hand from the Jacksonville Chamber, which early on saw the need to maintain a strong presence and has staffed its office with top people. (We need to add that the beaches once were separate from downtown in both areas, and that mergers made enough sense to overcome whatever political pulls there were.)
Our other beach areas have been more consistent in the past 15 years or so. The lower half of Amelia Island is resorts, the upper half is beach homes and condos. St. Johns has had spiffy beach homes for years, though the big money is slowly creeping down from Ponte Vedra. Jaguar quarterback Mark Brunell isn’t the only person to have a home in the $10 million range.
Is change for the better? Commissions aside, it sure makes selling easier to work a community that looks like it does today, rather than yesterday.
— Fred Seely is the editorial director of Bailey Publishing & Communications Inc and can be reached at [email protected].