North Port: Feeling the Post-Boom Hangover

The first thing you notice as you drive the hundreds of miles of crumbling roads in this once rapidly growing city is the enormous number of “For Sale” signs.

Every 9th or 10th house is either listed for sale or will be as soon as foreclosure proceedings are concluded.

All told, as many as 2,000 of North Port’s 20,600 homes hang over the market, grossly distorting any semblance of balance between supply and demand, data from the Sarasota County Multiple Listing Service, RealtyTrac.com and Port Charlotte property appraiser Dennis Black shows.

“Drive any block in North Port and you will see four or five ‘For Sale’ signs in every direction,” said Michael Tenn, a Daytona Beach resident still trying to sell the house his grandmother moved out of last year. “Everybody is trying to get rid of property.”

A few years ago, it was just the opposite.

Speculation was rampant and Florida home prices were bid up rapidly on the theory that retiring baby boomers would pay anything for a place in the sun.

The North Port housing market became the region’s ground zero for speculation.

With a huge surplus of lots and a government that saw growth as a way to redefine North Port as more than an affordable bedroom community, investors found the city the perfect place to flip houses to new buyers at ever-increasing prices.

It is a game that was played throughout Florida and across the United States during the boom. In North Port, it proved especially attractive because of the lower cost of land and houses, which allowed people of more limited means to play.

Now that the boom is over, North Port is suffering more than any other place in the Southwest Florida housing market. Its economy is based on home building and real estate sales, and those industries are now at a virtual standstill.

The victims of the bust are myriad.

Builders have pulled out or seriously curtailed their construction. Some are in the throes of bankruptcy while others have slashed payrolls.

That drop in workers means the businesses that were dependent on them as customers are also suffering. Shops and restaurants, tied to the building trade, have seen their sales drop as fast as the decline in home sales.

The homes that are on the market, or soon will be, represent a 4.7-year supply given the current pace of sales. That’s way beyond the four to six months of inventory considered normal in any market.

“It’s pretty doom and gloom,” said Jason Painter, a real estate agent with Program Realty LLC in North Port.

A draw for real estate
Even before the recent boom and bust, North Port was unlike any community in the region, except perhaps Port Charlotte, another headquarters for quick-sale real estate giant General Development Corp.

The southern Sarasota County community of North Port was founded in 1957 by the now-defunct General Development. It was a place where tens of thousands of empty lots could be sold to sunshine-hungry Florida mortgage borrowers of northern climes as their little pieces of paradise.

GDC’s sales tactics have become the stuff of local legend, with northerners lured to Florida for quick and selective tours of what was then North Port Charlotte.

North Port has long struggled with its growth and identity. At 103 square miles, it is a massive city of sometimes remote pine flatlands, thousands of pre-platted lots and a labyrinth of deteriorating roads built by GDC in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is the blue-collar enclave of Southwest Florida, a place where people of more moderate incomes could find a home to buy while working in Sarasota or Fort Myers.

Its sprawling roads and haphazard development makes it costly to provide water, sewer and other municipal services. But the city’s blank-palette nature was the very draw that brought so many speculators during the recent real estate boom.

North Port had grown to about 24,000 people by the new millennium. But spurred on by developers and government officials eager to expand the city’s tax base, North Port entered a prolonged growth spurt that sent its population past 40,000 in 2006, University of Florida data shows.

Builders put up thousands of moderate-size houses for working-class buyers. Thousands more popped up in more polished golf course communities with names like Bobcat Trail, The Woodlands and Heron Creek that flank the city like reservations for more affluent retirees.

In all, builders have constructed 9,700 homes in North Port since 2002.

Convinced that wave after wave of retiring baby boomers would continue to spur growth for years to come, builders kept building.

Today, all that has come to screeching halt.

As of mid-June, there were a total of 885 homes for sale in North Port, according to the Sarasota County Multiple Listing Service.

There also were nearly 200 FSBOs - homes for sale by owners - and 400 houses that builders erected on speculation and are holding in inventory, according to statistics provided by RealtyTrac.com and Black, the Port Charlotte appraiser who collected his numbers by interviewing individual builders.

In addition, another 195 homes have been foreclosed on by banks, while 305 more waiting to go through that same process, statistics provided by RealtyTrac.com show. It is possible that Florida mortgage loan lenders who took possession of those 195 homes also might have put them on the market for sale.

Feeling the pain
Homeowners, real estate agents and business people are all wrestling with North Port’s current situation.

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