Between the destinations of Lido Key and Anna Maria Island, LONGBOAT KEY is a fine mix of tasteful luxury and manicured surroundings. Just minutes from the heart of Sarasota, the long and narrow island feels like a secluded community with an elegant flavor of its own.
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Neighborhood Video Profile - Longboat Key
Michael Saunders & Company
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Pardon Me While I Go Tweet
Michael Saunders & Company
Despite its relatively brief existence, you’d almost need to be holed-up in the farthest reaches of an unwired galaxy to be unaware of the phenomenon known to billions on this planet as “social networking.” Love it or hate it, there’s no denying its explosive growth and mushrooming influence. Facebook, with its more than 400 million active users—half of whom log on to the site daily and remain there for an average of more than 55 minutes—will celebrate only its sixth birthday next month. On its third birthday in 2007, Facebook boasted a mere 21 million active users spending an average of 20 minutes there each day. Talk about a colossal growth spurt.Today, if Facebook were its own nation, it would be the world’s third most populous after China and India. Far from being for English-speaking users only, 70% of Facebook’s members live outside the U.S and rely on more than 70 available translations.
Social networking. People either swear by it, or swear at it. Either way, you can’t ignore the ability of online social networks to instantly touch the lives of massive amounts of people—around the globe—with more useful information and visual content delivered instantly than could ever be efficiently distributed via traditional paid media.
Users of Facebook post more than 60 million status updates each day; along with 3 billion photos and more than 5 billion items of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) each month. It’s both a visual feast and an entertaining way to keep abreast of friends, colleagues and acquaintances you might not otherwise communicate with nearly as often—if at all. New contacts are made and old friendships dusted-off as Facebook users connect with others outside their own social milieu and location, freeing them to form online communities around common interests, instead of just common geography.
Facebook is by no means the only social networking site to boast a massive worldwide audience. It is joined in that arena by scores of other specialized sites, including Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Following January’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, global leaders launched their own secure online social network through which they can continue to convene, post new information; and collaborate among sub-groups formed at the meeting. Dubbed the World Electronic Community—or WELCOM—the forum’s exclusive online network has about 5,000 members.
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Approaching Equilibrium
Michael Saunders & Company
A moment that seemed choreographed to cause maximum confusion about whether the housing market is in recovery—or not—took place in real estate markets across Florida last week. No sooner had the National Association of REALTORS® issued its nationwide snapshot of existing home and condominium sales for the month of January than the Florida Association of REALTORS® released its own statewide recap. To say the least, the two sets of monthly statistics clashed dramatically, painting very different pictures of the market.Poised for national sales to finish up slightly in January, economists were caught off balance by NAR’s announcement that unit sales had actually declined nationwide for the second straight month, falling to the lowest level since last June. Rightly or wrongly, the result was widely interpreted as a sign that the national housing recovery might be faltering.
Then—literally moments later—January sales for Florida were released by the Florida Association of REALTORS®. The contrast between the two sets of results could not have been sharper; proving once again the old business adage that “all real estate is local.”
Far from mimicking the sluggish national trend, Florida’s existing home sales continue to blaze a trail of sustained recovery in the price ranges below $350,000. Sales here rose impressively again in January, marking 17 straight months in which statewide sales have increased in year-over-year comparisons.
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Vote "Yes" on March 16th
Michael Saunders & Company
Mother Nature has been exceedingly generous in the amenities she’s bestowed on Southwest Florida. Our top-rated beaches and magnificent web of pristine waterways—enjoyed amid abundant year-round warmth and sunshine—are why so many newcomers choose Sarasota County over all other possibilities in the Sunshine State.The amenities we should be proudest of, however, are the ones we’ve bestowed on ourselves. These, of course, include an impressive list of educational and cultural amenities; which continuously attract newcomers wanting more on their family’s horizon than a picturesque sunset. As a community striving for a better brand of economic stability than we’ve gotten of late from tourism and development, it will ultimately be the quality of our public schools that will attract the businesses that help us diversify. Virtually any town on Florida’s two coasts offers plentiful recreational amenities; but the decision where to re-locate a business—or start a new one—is more apt to turn on the quality of an area’s school system rather than the sum of its beach and boating opportunities.
We should congratulate ourselves therefore for the steps we’ve taken over the years to improve the quality and output of our schools. In a state not renowned for the scintillating quality of its public schools, the voters of Sarasota County have gone to the polls time and again to reject mediocrity in their home district. Most recently, in 2006, we voted “Yes” to renew our 2002 pledge of setting aside one mill in annual property taxes to preserve our top-ranked schools.
On Tuesday, March 16 we are being asked to renew this pledge again at a time when its critical funding has never been more urgently needed. Please join us; first by showing up at the polls to have your voice heard on this important issue. Then if you believe as we do in the power of good schools to bring prosperity to a region, please vote “Yes” for another four-year continuation of the one mill. Early voting for the referendum commences Monday, March 1st. To learn more about the absentee and early voting schedule; or to preview a sample of the referendum ballot visit srqelections.com.
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The Price is Right
Michael Saunders & Company
Although it’s impossible to predict the bottom of our real estate market with anything other than months of perfect hindsight after the fact, who can blame home buyers in this economy for at least attempting to time it to their advantage? In the best of times, saving big on one of life’s biggest purchases is as American as apple pie. In troubled times, it’s a daily crusade.Yet, even if one could magically time bottoming home prices to the split second, you would still make a tactical mistake as a would-be borrower if you failed to notice a similar bottoming-out of mortgage interest rates. Indeed, by allowing interest rates to climb while you wait for prices to fall, you can easily end up paying more for a property than if you actually bought it at today’s price while locked into today’s historically low interest rate. That rate is presently hovering around 4.88%, give or take.
Meanwhile, there’s scarcely an expert on the market who doesn’t fully believe that mortgage rates have but one way to go—up. Rates have essentially been held as low as they’re likely to go for quite some time now in order to stimulate sales. However, March 31st is expected to mark the beginning of a trend toward fewer stimuli and more tough love for the housing market—mainly in the form of higher interest rates.
That day—the last of this year’s first fiscal quarter—is the deadline the Federal Reserve has given itself to begin scaling back on its widespread purchases of mortgage-backed securities. Once this deadline has passed, most experts believe the Fed will begin in earnest to wean itself from propping-up a market that is already showing encouraging signs of sustaining itself through the lowest prices of a decade.
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Sarasota, Manatee & Charlotte Counties: Year Over Year Sales Comparison
Michael Saunders & Company
Recent trends in the Southwest Florida real estate market—as reported by TRENDGRAPHIX—continue to show encouraging signs of a market in recovery. Year-over-year inventories of existing homes for sale are down by nearly a fifth to a quarter across all three counties of Southwest Florida; while both closed and pending sales in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte Counties remain steady and dramatic.
*Data courtesy of Trendgraphix
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Special Teams
Michael Saunders & Company
There’s nothing like a major upset in a riveting Super Bowl to remind us how important teamwork, preparation, focus and the right attitude are. After all, strip away the hype and hoopla. Skip the big-name entertainment, talking heads, pre-game interviews and trash-talking press conferences; and the Super Bowl ultimately drills down to which team shows up with enough heart to win. For doing just that, and winning it’s first-ever championship, we congratulate the New Orleans Saints along with every faithful fan from the “Who Dat Nation.”The business of selling your home in today’s real estate market is one of life’s biggest Super Bowl events, requiring as much teamwork, preparation and focus as pro football’s premier match-up; but with no fumbles, interceptions or penalties allowed. When you list your property with the team from Michael Saunders & Company, your quest for the ideal outcome is actually heightened through the combined efforts of several special teams within a team. Their common goal? To sell your home as quickly, efficiently—and as uneventfully—as possible; for as much as today’s market will allow.
Sending in our special teams on your behalf begins with the preparation of a thorough Competitive Market Analysis (or CMA). A timely and well-documented CMA shows exactly how your home stacks up against its competition; and how it must be priced to become an instant must-see for buyers in its competitive set. If necessary, the special team from MSC Style can step-in to make sure your home looks and shows to maximum advantage through a number of recommendations proven to help a home sell faster.
Once ready for the market, the special teams from MSC Marketing and MSC Technology swing into action to make sure your home is properly showcased and presented to as many potential buyers as possible. Now that nine out of ten buyers start their property searches on the Internet the logical first step, of course, is to upload your property’s complete listing information onto michaelsaunders.com, by far the # 1 trafficked web site in Southwest Florida. No other company in Southwest Florida has invested more time, money or talent into making sure that ours is at once the easiest to access, easiest to use and most information-packed real estate Web site in the region, if not the country.
If you opt—as many of today’s sellers do—to price your home aggressively below competitive properties, it becomes immediately eligible to appear in the Best Opportunities section of michaelsaunders.com. Because Best Opportunities is routinely visited and re-visited by today’s most value-conscious buyers, its featured listings average well over 500 showings per property. Moreover, since debuting last May, 41% of the 812 listings that have appeared in the section have sold.
Additionally, your property listing is uplinked to more than 2,000 other local, regional, national and international web sites for additional exposure to buyers everywhere.
On the local front, with more than 550 agents working from 16 strategically-located sales offices, the ground team at Michael Saunders & Company is uniquely capable of capturing buyers wherever they happen to show-up first. Many of these agents will preview your property during the company’s weekly caravan of new properties. Here they actually visit the home in person to assess its potential compatibility with the housing needs of their extensive databases of buyers.
On a much broader scale, our worldwide brokerage affiliations—strategic alliances formed over nearly four decades and strengthened by Michael Saunders’ continuous top-level involvement with each—are another way we make sure your home is systematically exposed to the most potential buyers. These affiliations include Christie’s Great Estates, Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, Luxury Portfolio, EREN—The European Real Estate Network, Luxuryrealestate.com and Mayfair International Realty.
It goes without saying that each offer received on your home is formally presented to you; then skillfully negotiated until one is accepted and a contract approved by both parties. During this critical phase of the sale, two more special teams are prepared to go to work for you. MSC Mortgage smoothes the way to a closed sale by pre-qualifying buyers for the safest and best loan products available on the market today. Meanwhile, the team from MSC Title makes sure that all title issues are carefully researched and examined to assure free and clear title to the property. If your immediate needs are best served through the “short sale” process, our MSC Short Sale Division puts a team of experienced short sale negotiators in your corner.
Our market has at long last experienced months of positive and sustained buyer activity. If your 2010 game plan includes selling your home, invite an agent from Michael Saunders & Company to explain how listing it with the # 1 real estate team in Southwest Florida will put a new owner inside faster than you can say “Who dat?”
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The Great Buyers' Market of 2010
Michael Saunders & Company
Our nation has been experiencing a one-day-at-a-time economic recovery, punctuated by fits and starts. Finally, however, the good news is consistently outweighing the bad; allowing for a sustained measure of confidence to seep back into our battered psyches. In fact, consumer confidence across the U.S. rose in January to the highest level since September 2008 as new signs of recovery caused Americans to feel more optimistic about their immediate futures. Florida’s consumer confidence index also rose unexpectedly in January—by five points, to 74—with the biggest jump being in the perception of whether it is a good time to buy big-ticket consumer items.For sure, confidence has at long last trumped fear and trepidation with respect to our local housing market. The months-long buying binge in the price tiers below $400,000 is showing no signs of letting up; especially as season revs into high gear and buyers continue to compete for pared-down inventories of lower-priced properties.
This should come as welcome news to everyone—including pundits, prognosticators and seasoned market watchers—who believes a recovery in the housing and labor markets are the essential ingredients for restoring our nation’s overall economic health. Moreover, while virtually every housing market in Florida continues to grapple with the twin hurdles of high unemployment and record foreclosures, Southwest Florida’s has been on a solid trend toward recovery and price stability for the better part of the last six months in spite of these serious and ongoing obstacles.
While the U.S. experienced a 16.7 percent dip in existing home sales between November and December of last year—the largest such monthly decline in more than 40 years—Sarasota-Manatee veered hard in the opposite direction; notching a 43 percent increase in existing home sales; while Charlotte County posted an equally impressive 42 percent increase. Furthermore, while December’s decline in national sales was largely attributed to buyer belief that time had run out on the first time home buyers tax credit, that perception did nothing to put the brakes on sales in Southwest Florida. In fact, the last time our region saw a monthly decline approaching 17 percent in unit sales of existing homes was between July and August of last year. Since then, sales and pendings have shown nothing but consistent improvement.
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The Buyers’ Choice
Michael Saunders & Company
If selling your home or condominium is high on your agenda in 2010 here are some important facts you should know.
Any licensed brokerage is capable of listing your property. But only one is the undisputed leader in finding buyers for homes on Longboat Key. Michael Saunders & Company.
The proof is in the performance. Based on dollar volume sales over the past 12 months—as recorded by the Mid Florida MLS and published by the leading independent real estate tracking firm TRENDGRAPHIX—agents from Michael Saunders & Company bring buyers to Longboat Key property sales nearly twice as often as their next closest competitor.
As the below bar graphs depict, this phenomenon holds true across all price ranges; but becomes noticeably more dramatic as the price range increases. For properties $1 million and up, our agents furnish buyers more often than our next four closest competitors combined.
Before you list your Longboat Key property, contact an agent from Michael Saunders & Company. Find out how the region’s largest network of top-producing agents, its most heavily-frequented Web site and unparalleled network of international brokerage affiliations will help you succeed in finding a buyer faster. After all, isn’t that what selling your home is all about?
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Rule Britannia
Michael Saunders & Company
As informed trend watchers will tell you, buyers from the United Kingdom are not only among today’s most active homebuyers in Southwest Florida; but have traditionally favored our region over all other possibilities on Florida’s two coasts. So much, in fact, do they prefer our particular blend of climate, culture and coastal ambiance that they purchase residential properties in the Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice market at a rate nearly three times higher than either of their next two closest preferences—Naples and Tampa-St Petersburg. (Source: Florida Association of Realtor’s 2009 Survey of International Homebuyers)Therefore, the decision to sell your home in Sarasota, Manatee or Charlotte Counties should by all measures include choosing a company that can provide you with the strongest and most comprehensive network of incoming international referrals—both from around the world and across the U.K.
At Michael Saunders & Company, we’re exceptionally proud of our exclusive network of worldwide brokerage affiliations—pieced together carefully over more than three decades—that enable us to put your property on the radar screens of qualified buyers everywhere. These affiliations include Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, Luxury Portfolio, Christie’s Great Estates, the European Real Estate Network and Mayfair International Realty.
While each of these exclusive affiliations is international in scope and strategically important in its own right, Mayfair International Realty is especially key toward helping our agents effectively connect with buyers from the U.K.—who last year alone accounted for 16% of all Florida home sales to foreign buyers.
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