Checking Out The Housing Market

It was a good day to drive around and check out the housing market in this area. Not that we would ever seriously look at moving to this area, but we were curious to see what has happened to property values in the greater Orlando area. We went to a 55+ community in a small town called Poinciana, which is about 20 miles south of Kissimmee and Orlando. The name of the community is Solivita, and, just as in the case of all of these communities, we were matched up with a salesman who took us on a tour of the place and showed us, after some probing, some of the available homes and models that we might be interested in buying. There were actually some pretty good deals if we were in the market. They had homes that were completed and available at a "blowout" price and some others that were "field" models and would be available to build. Almost all of the home sites back to either woods or small lakes, so there aren't people behind you in most cases. The house that we liked the best was a 2098 S.F. great room home that had a similar floorplan to our home in Surprise - but almost 300 S.F. larger. It was available, with lots of upgrades and on a premium lot for $224,000, which seemed like a steal to us. That is, if you wanted to live in central Florida with not much of anything around for miles except Disney World. It did have two championship golf courses and a beautiful clubhouse complex which they called the "Village". It was actually many different buildings, layed out like a little village, containing all the typical clubhouse fare - crafts, meeting rooms, fitness center, indoor and outdoor pools, etc. They even had a local branch of Wachovia Bank in one of the buildings.

That was an interesting afternoon. It appears that property values, in this area at least, are holding low. Although this segment of the market - 55+ communities - haven't been impacted as much as other housing developments. The salesman told us that they average about 15 home sales a month and they are almost all cash sales. The real negative to us was that they charge a $312/mo association fee which covers your outside lawn care, use of the clubhouse facilities, security and not much else. That seemed like a lot of money to us, and it is going up this year. So much for living among the alligators.

We have what we hope will be our final appointment at Camping World today. The rig goes in at 1 PM for some final tests and they feel that the problem can be fixed with no additional parts required. It turns out that the parts sent to Chattanooga were installed there, even though they weren't the ones ordered. We still can't figure out that one, since they made no difference in the jacks. The local people seem to feel that they only have to "bleed" the lines and everything will be OK again. We hope they are right.

We plan to use our 2nd mini golf ticket while they work on our rig this afternoon. It is cool this morning - 40 degrees - but is suppose to warm up to 70. It should be a nice day...