How about an early peek at March sales of existing homes in Palm Beach County? Are you sure you want to know?

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The number Treasure Coast residents falling behind on their monthly Florida mortgage payments has soared in the past year, raising fears that many of the delinquent property owners will lose their homes to foreclosure this year and next.

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Faced with the prospect of property tax cuts barreling down from the Legislature, Palm Beach County and its cities are bracing for a wallop that could cost them, under the state’s harshest plan, more than $367 million.

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The gloves are coming off between the official home appraisers of Palm Beach and Broward counties. And it’s getting ugly.

According to the Palm Beach Post, Palm Beach County appraiser Gary Nikolits started the latest rift with his counterpart to the south by pointing out the much higher number of taxpayer protests filed in Broward County.

In a speech to members of the Economic Forum in West Palm Beach, Nikolits called his audience’s attention to a one-page handout showing that 5,482 Palm Beach County property owners protested their assessment last year.

In Broward County, 19,894 owners protested.

“I’ve been characterized by the Broward property appraiser as not being particularly taxpayer friendly,” Nikolits said. “In my opinion, taxpayer-friendly means you treat all property tax payers the same, that you don’t treat your friends, or political contributors differently.”

The Broward County Property Appraiser, Lori Parrish, countered that Nikolits’ numbers exaggerated the complaints filed by taxpayers.

Many of the protests were filed by homeowners who had missed the deadline for filing for a homestead exemption to which they were entitled.

Parrish said her workers encourage taxpayers to file protests so they can still reap the benefit of the homestead exemption.

“He’s just trying to save his political butt,” Parrish said of Nikolits. “Our office prides itself on being customer-friendly.”

In a world of shockingly expensive Florida mortgages and insurance, taxes are yet another escalating problem in the Sunshine State. And this is not the first time Nikolits and Parrish have clashed.

Parrish lowered assessments on commercial real estate by looking not just at fair market value but also at the income a property produces, an approach she considers to be friendlier to taxpayers.

Nikolits counters that the Florida Constitution requires county property appraisers to base their assessments on what a property would fetch in the open market. He said more complaints filed in Broward reflects on how Parrish is doing her job.

“I think a measure of being taxpayer-friendly is how many people actually complain about the job that you’re doing,” Nikolits said. “If four times as many people are complaining in Broward County as here, then I think I can reverse that and say I’m probably a little bit more taxpayer-friendly.”

In the meantime, Nikolits said homeowners shouldn’t expect tax assessments to fall this year. Despite low Florida mortgage rates, a slumping housing market has caused prices to plateau, not plummet - with exceptions such as downtown West Palm Beach’s condo market.

“There are pockets in this county that have seen significant decreases in market values, particularly in those areas that have been overdeveloped with condominiums and townhouse projects,” Nikolits said.

Continue reading in the Palm Beach Post …

It’s been a long time coming.

But it appears it’s been worth it.

Enlightened ownership, a committed real estate developer and strong-willed county officials have carved out a place for working families to live in southern Palm Beach County.

Green Cay Village west of Boynton Beach shows that “quality” and “workforce housing” are not mutually exclusive terms, the Palm Beach Post reports.

Homes with granite counter tops, “green” appliances, a community center with a fitness room and pool are available for sale between $200,000 and $300,000 and for rent at less than $800 a month - a fraction of what a Florida mortgage would set someone back at “market” rates.

As demand for lower-priced homes outstrips supply in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast, builders and governments have to find ways to deliver affordable housing. Green Cay can be an example.

Far removed from the 1960s-style housing projects that so many Florida retirees detest, it’s a place, as The Post reported Monday, where single mothers such as Loren Mulligan, a middle school teacher in Boca Raton, can afford her own home.

Buyers must live in their unit. To deter speculators looking to snap up Florida mortgages, people can buy only one home apiece. If the buyers go and sell in the first year, the developer (Goray Communities) keeps the profit.

Green Cay actually started, as so many deals do, with failure. Landowner Ted Winsberg’s plan to sell his farm at Jog and Flavor Pict roads for senior housing fell through. So he gave up potential profit and found builders willing to commit to workforce housing.

The developers lined up a Housing Finance Authority loan that required the county commission’s blessing. The deal ran into 2004 election-year politics, as Mary McCarty, a Republican, rallied opposition to hurt Burt Aaronson, a Democrat who represents the district.

Commissioner Aaronson kept the project alive and won reelection handily.

No one thing can account for Green Cay’s success. But it starts with the cost of land. If a landowner is not willing sacrifice some profits, counties can offer subsidies and impose rules to make sure buyers benefit.

Far from the image of a tenement that many imagined, it’s a place where an affordable Florida mortgage loan can be realized - and a model for Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast of how the private and public sectors can work together to meet demand for quality affordable housing.

SOURCE: Palm Beach Post

Hilltop Gardens Mobile Home Park is dying. The once lively park with the fruity street names now is mostly deserted. An eviction notice of April 30 is in effect.

According to the Palm Beach Post, the dozen or so residents left at the 150-trailer park said it’s yet another affordable housing oasis gobbled up by developers.

“We have nowhere to go,” said Gustavo Jimenez, a cook who paid $8,000 for the single-wide trailer two years ago and was given $2,000 by a developer to leave the trailer.

In a part of the state where Florida mortgage costs are astronomic compared to what lower- and even middle-class residents make, the mobile home park offered a reprieve. No longer.

The owners, Hilltop Residential LTD, plan a townhouse development to be built by California-based Standard Pacific Homes. Hilltop bought the park just east of H.L. Watkins Middle School in 2005, sending out eviction notices requiring residents to leave by October 2005.

The notice complied with the Florida Mobile Home Act which requires owners to give residents at least six months eviction notice. Residents hired lawyer Karen Mentor and filed suit in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, which ruled tenants be given another 12 months to stay.

The ruling requires the new owners to reimburse residents up to $6,000 to sign a bill of sale and move their double-wide mobile homes. Residents are given $3,000 to move single-wide mobile homes.

“These people are getting bulldozed. They should at least give them enough to start somewhere. This amount is not even close to a down payment in Palm Beach County,” said Mentor.

Resident Bill Armstrong, 56, plans to move in with his mother. When he and his wife Monika bought their single-wide, their plan was to improve their investment and sell for a profit. Hurricanes and a slow South Florida housing market ended that idea.

“This was a beautiful place when we moved in,” he said, nodding to the empty mobile homes and silent streets around him. “Now look at it.”

Where a multitude of residents go from here in this environment of super expensive Florida mortgage loan payments remains to be seen.

Continue reading in the Palm Beach Post …

The rich in the Palm Beach County housing market are reaping a disproportionate share of the tax breaks from the voter-approved Save Our Homes law aimed at helping longtime residents stay in their homes, a South Florida Sun-Sentinel analysis of property records shows.

The biggest beneficiaries: an elite class with homes worth an average of $1.8 million. Their palatial homes and waterfront mansions comprise only 4 percent of Palm Beach County’s stock of homesteaded properties, but they get one-fifth of the financial benefit of the tax-cutting Save Our Homes constitutional amendment.

For these 10,962 homeowners, almost half their property values go untaxed, according to the paper’s analysis. By comparison, another group of Florida mortgage holders with $194,000 average property values sees less savings - 35 percent off their taxable value.

The reason: the county’s most expensive homes, clustered on Palm Beach and other barrier islands, have appreciated faster than those in middle-income neighborhoods during the six-year housing boom.

Palm Beach County has 2,180 homes with at least $1 million in untaxed value, up from just 318 in 2001.

Celebrities such as radio personality Rush Limbaugh, golfer Jack Nicklaus and Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer are among those with the biggest savings.

“I love it, obviously,” said attorney Bob Montgomery, who saves $265,000 in annual taxes on his $24 million Palm Beach mansion. He still pays $173,000 in property taxes per year.

“I pay it with a sigh of a relief and a thanks to the heavens,” Montgomery added.

It’s another quirk in the 1992 Save Our Homes law, which is under heavy scrutiny in the state Legislature because it gives big tax breaks to longtime homeowners/Florida mortgage loan borrowers while snowbirds, renters, businesses and new homebuyers languish. Analysts for a legislative committee warn that the system is “highly skewed” toward the wealthy.

“There’s a huge inequity,” said Commissioner Mary McCarty, who benefits greatly from Save Our Homes because she pays taxes on less than a quarter of her Delray Beach home’s $982,000 market value. “It’s not fair, but when the people of Florida were asked to vote on this, they weren’t asked to vote fair. They were asked to vote in their own self-interest, which they did.”

In all, Save Our Homes, which caps annual increases in taxable value on homestead residences at 3 percent, wiped $47 billion in property values off the tax rolls in Palm Beach County last year, compared with $4.7 billion in 2001.

It saves taxpayers an average $3,126, but the savings are distributed unevenly. The wealthy get super-sized tax breaks. Jimmy Buffet’s Palm Beach mansion is worth $17.9 million, but taxed at $5.9 million - a 67 percent discount.

To be sure, Save Our Homes hasn’t shielded the rich from eye-popping tax bills. Investor Lawrence J. DeGeorge pays taxes on less than 40 percent of the $5.9 million value of his waterfront home in Jupiter, but he said he hardly feels fortunate. His tax bill: $47,500.

“I don’t know whether I’m paying too much, but I’ll bet you the top 20 percent are paying 80 percent of the property taxes,” he said.

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Call Green Cay Village controversial. Call it energy-efficient, as Florida Power & Light does. Or call it affordable housing, as Palm Beach County does.

Loren Mulligan - a 43-year-old single mother of twins and teacher at Loggers Run Middle School in Boca Raton - calls Green Cay Village, a workforce housing development west of Boynton Beach, something simpler: home.

“A big burden has been taken off my chest,” said Mulligan, who moved in nine days ago. “I was renting, and I couldn’t find anything to buy in my price range until this.

“Now I have a home, and I don’t have to worry anymore.”

Mulligan put down a deposit the first week Green Cay Village opened its sales office and was among the first new homeowners to move into the 420-unit development at the corner of Jog and Flavor Pict roads.

The $85 million collection of Florida condos, townhouses and apartments is priced to be affordable for teachers, nurses and police officers - the county’s “essential workers.”

Instead of marketing Green Cay Village in the typical way, the developers went straight to where they knew the buyers were: police stations, schools, hospitals, county government offices and the like.

They did this even before Palm Beach County mandated that developers set aside a percentage of their new homes for workforce housing.

“When we first started, the term ‘workforce housing’ wasn’t even invented,” said Green Cay Village developer Jerry Goray of Goray Communities in Boca Raton. “We said we were going to build for Middle America - people who have been priced out of the market.”

Palm Beach County was one of those markets.

In just five years of boom-time housing appreciation, existing-home prices soared by triple digits in Palm Beach County, but incomes rose by a measly single digit, making Florida home loan acquisitions nearly impossible for many residents.

In fact, a startling survey last year by the Housing Leadership Council of Palm Beach County concluded that as many as 90 percent of households could not afford to buy the median-priced single-family home, which cost $392,900 in the first quarter of 2006.

Home prices have remained relatively stable this year as the market cooled down, dropping in February to a median price of $374,300 for an existing single-family home and to $209,600 for an existing condo, according to the Florida Association of Realtors.

The prices at Green Cay Village range from a more affordable $198,900 to $299,900, however, making all the difference in the world to prospective applicants for Florida mortgage loans.

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Florida real estate agents across South Florida swear they’re busy as the spring home-selling season approaches. But for the most part, finicky buyers are waiting for prices to keep falling and for property tax relief to trickle down from Tallahassee.

“Phone calls are up, and we have a lot of buyers sitting on the fence,” said Mike Kleinrichert, an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Wellington. “But we’ve got people saying, `I’m not going to buy until I know what’s going on.’”

Existing home sales and prices fell across the Palm Beach County housing market in February as the housing slump settles in for what experts say could be another long year.

New revelations of the troubles in the so-called subprime mortgage industry threaten to prolong the housing doldrums, experts say. High-risk borrowers who got Florida home loans during the boom years now are having trouble making the monthly payments and some are losing their homes to foreclosure.

Last month in Palm Beach County, the median Florida home price of an existing home was $374,300, down $16,700 from $391,000 a year ago. Sales plunged 21 percent, to 560 from 707 a year ago, according to the Florida Association of Realtors.

Those figures mirror what’s happening in Broward County and across Florida. Statewide, sales fell 23 percent and the median price of $235,500 decreased 3 percent from a year ago.

Nationally, sales unexpectedly rose last month while the median dropped to $212,800, down 1.3 percent from February 2006. Analysts expect South Florida’s median prices to remain flat or decline through the end of 2007. The median means half the homes sold for more, half for less.

“Assuming we don’t have a recession, I think we’ll start seeing some improvement by the end of the first quarter of 2008,” said Lewis Goodkin, a Miami-based real estate consultant.

South Florida’s overbuilt condominium market also faltered in February.

Palm Beach County had 462 sales last month, down 14 percent from 535 a year ago. The median price was $209,600, off $11,200 from $220,800 in February 2006.

Meanwhile, spring typically is when families look to buy because they want to be settled in time for the next school year. But agents agree that most home and condo buyers are reluctant to commit now because of the uncertainty surrounding property insurance and taxes.

Florida legislators addressed skyrocketing insurance rates during a special legislative session in January, but many people question whether they will receive the savings officials have promised. Legislators now are considering changes that would reduce property taxes, although they have yet to agree on how best to do that.

While some expect a surge in sales once the tax issues are sorted out, analysts fear the looming shakeout among subprime lenders could temper any recovery in South Florida’s housing market. Skittish lenders are starting to tighten credit standards, and that will reduce the pool of qualified Florida mortgage borrowers.

“It used to be that all you needed was a pulse to get a mortgage,” said Mike Larson, an analyst with Weiss Research in Jupiter. “Now people won’t be able to buy or they’ll have to spend some time saving up, things they haven’t had to do in a while.”

Subprime home loans, made to borrowers with poor credit, have a much bigger share of the region’s real estate market than the nationwide average, according to a San Francisco-based mortgage data company.

More South Florida homeowners were late on their house payments last month, compared with a year ago, increasing the risk of foreclosures, according to Plantation-based Realestat.com. Homes in foreclosure eventually will go back on the market, adding to an already hefty inventory.

The number of homes and condos for sale continues to grow in Palm Beach County. The number now stands at 33,587, a 10 percent increase from a year ago, according to the Miami-based Keyes Co. At the current pace, it would take several years to sell those properties.

Many sellers already have been waiting months to find buyers.

Kelly and Todd Gilmore have tried to sell their three-bedroom home in the Boca Raton housing market since early November. He moved to Denver last year to take a new job, and she finally joined him this month when it became clear no sale was imminent.

The couple originally listed the home at $599,000 before reducing it to $549,000. This week, they cut it to $519,000.

“It’s been an emotional experience,” said Kelly Gilmore, 31. “We’re trying to bide our time.”

SOURCE: The Sun-Sentinel

Beach, sun and opportunity have long drawn people from across the United States to Palm Beach County’s posh neighborhoods and low-slung homes alike. But for the first time in years, the steady growth has taken a dip - thanks to soaring insurance rates and property taxes, experts say.

After averaging 26,300 newcomers a year between 2000 and 2005, the county’s population increased by only 9,057 between 2005 and 2006, according to census data released Thursday. And 829 people left this Florida housing market for other parts of the state and the country, bucking a trend long fueled by golf-playing retirees and middle-class families escaping congestion farther south.

Until 2005, Palm Beach County ranked fifth in population growth among Florida’s 67 counties this decade. It dropped to 12th place between 2005 and 2006.

The numbers of outwardly bound residents are more dramatic in Broward County, which lost 18,459 people between 2005 and 2006.

Palm Beach still saw moderate growth last year, spurred mostly by births and the 7,669 newly arrived immigrants who are adding to the area’s rich international character. Still, business leaders and demographers worry that soaring living costs have placed Palm Beach County and the overall South Florida housing market beyond the grasp of average families.

Most pointed to the combined burden of high property taxes and insurance rates.

“We have major problems with people being able to afford homes in Palm Beach County, but it’s not because of the housing market. The crisis is in our taxes and insurance,” William Cozart, chief executive officer of the Realtors Association of Palm Beach County, based in Lake Worth. ”

Buyers actually have wonderful choices, but they soon realize their [Florida mortgage] payments are not as high as their property taxes and insurance. It’s devastating and worsens the economy. It makes it difficult for businesses to recruit people to live here.”

Fleeing the steely winters of New York City, Barry and Linda Horowitz, both 62, moved to South Florida 22 years ago. They figured they’d retire here after setting up a successful apparel-design company that sells uniforms to prisons and other institutions. But today, their combined yearly payments for medical insurance, property tax and property insurance total more than $27,000.

The pair put their 3-bedroom Boca Raton home on the market two months ago. They have their sights on Atlanta, the new mecca of affordability for those fleeing South Florida’s exorbitant costs.

“Here we are trying to bring Scripps to this county and create jobs. Yet people are leaving. If I were in the governor’s seat, I’d be very concerned,” Horowitz said.

Sociology professor Arthur Evans at Florida Atlantic University said South Florida continues to attract blacks, but many of those coming were “black professionals, educated blacks from the Caribbean, who are members of the middle class and upper class.”

Low-income minorities are often hardest hit by the soaring Palm Beach housing costs.

The 400-member Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Palm Beach County has fielded many calls in the past year from Hispanic renters dumbfounded by the spike in their rents.

“Landlords are squeezed by the high insurance and property taxes, and people at the end of the totem pole are getting hurt,” said Pedro Guilarte, chamber president. “You have families doubling up in one house to make ends meet.”

Between 2000 and 2006, a gain of two newcomers from within the U.S. was matched by one immigrant. In the 1990s, for every five people that Palm Beach County’s population gained as a result of newcomers from elsewhere in the United States, the county population increased by two immigrants.

Clearly, the area remains attractive to newly arrived immigrants and deep-pocketed U.S. Florida mortgage loan borrowers who find in Palm Beach County a home and playground.

“Broward and Palm Beach counties have become magnets for the yuppie elderly,” Evans said. “We still have people coming here. They are people with disposable income.”

Or those who dream of accumulating disposable income.

Striving newcomers from countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela form the bulk of the county’s growth and have transformed neighborhoods into bilingual mosaics.

“Palm Beach County is the most friendly county to live in,” said Jose Cerrato, president of the Honduran Organization of Palm Beach County. “Plus, there’s the climate.”

SOURCE: The Palm Beach Post