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Coffee Talk
+ Tampa entrepreneur sees houses move
The slowdown in the housing market has been reported nationally, but one Tampa company has found a niche in that industry and is seeing signs of a potential turnaround.
New Homes Realty, formed in 1994, is a national online buyer's brokerage. It does not work with sellers.
It employs 250 agents throughout the country to work with buyers who see the homes listed on www.newhomes.com.
"Sales are better than expected, but it's been a tough year," says Valeri Marks, the firm's chief executive officer.
Still, there is at least one reason for optimism: Sales at her company were up 61.5% in Florida from February to March and up 27% at her company nationwide.
"We're starting to see some positive signs," Marks says.
New Homes lists homes in 17 states. It deals with both relocations and new homes.
The company saw a sales peak in 2005. It continued strong in 2006, but then started seeing a falloff in late 2006 and 2007.
Marks notes that Realtor associations on the Gulf Coast are also reporting stronger interest.
"The message is that people are buying," Marks says. "The market is starting to move."
+ Eastern Europeans look to Florida
When various marketing and branding gurus on the Gulf Coast coined a version of the 'Time to Buy' slogan for the struggling real estate market last year, they were mostly targeting Floridians. Maybe some Canadians and Brits, too, who have traditionally vacationed in droves along the Gulf Coast.
Turns out though, that the ubiquitous slogan translates smoothly into Czechoslovakian.
Ivo Travnicek, a Sarasota corporate attorney and Czech native, tells Coffee Talk that a recent trip to his homeland, where he spoke at a real estate investor conference, resulted in recruiting five likely buyers for condos and other properties in Sarasota. The trip was so successful, Travnicek adds, that now a charter airline company based out of Prague is in the process of setting up some flights to Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, so more interested buyers can check out other parts of the Gulf Coast.
To be sure, Europeans' interest in buying property in Florida is nothing new. But that interest, combined with falling home prices and the low value of the dollar, has led to some niche opportunities for Travnicek. For now, he's just serving as a friendly consultant to the Czech buyers, not the real estate broker. "Buying real estate in the U.S. is a different animal and they are in the dark over there," Travnicek tells Coffee Talk.
Travnicek says he's spoken with Czechs about the closing process and property taxes in Florida, among other issues. He's also pitched Sarasota as a better alternative to Miami, the traditional vacation and relocation site for many eastern Europeans.
+ Lee foreclosures hit
1-in-33 households
RealtyTrac, the firm that tracks foreclosures nationwide, recently issued a report ranking metro areas with the steepest rates of foreclosures in the first quarter.
Missing from the list: Cape Coral-Fort Myers.
But that's because the report ranked the largest 100 metro areas and Lee County is not among those. But if it had been included, Cape Coral-Fort Myers would have the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country at 1-in-33 households getting a foreclosure notice in the first quarter.
Only Stockton, Calif., had a higher foreclosure rate per household at 1 in 30. Other Gulf Coast areas had relatively high foreclosure rates, including Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice (1 in 89 households; ranked 15th highest in the nation) and Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater (1 in 110 households; ranked 21st in the nation).
+ Ms. Baugh goes
to Washington
Vanessa Baugh, a Lakewood Ranch jewelry store owner who sometimes serves as the unofficial spokeswoman for small businesses in Sarasota and Manatee counties, is used to getting phone calls for help, sometimes even desperate ones. She's rarely short for words on what ails and what can cure the problems of small businesses.
But a recent voice mail left on her cell phone nearly drove Baugh to silence: It was an assistant for U.S Congressman Vern Buchanan, R-Longboat Key, asking her to come up Washington, D.C. to testify before a congressional subcommittee on how the nationwide credit crisis has impacted small business - and what, if anything, the government can do about it. "I'm so excited," Baugh said a few days before her scheduled testimony. "I can't stand it."
Baugh, who also recently spoke on small-business issues before a state government panel in Tallahassee, was scheduled to speak before the small business subcommittee April 30. She planned to testify about how tough it is for small companies (defined as those with revenues under $5 million) to get bank financing today. Cash flows are shrinking and so too are home equity lines, long a source of capital for entrepreneurs. Says Baugh: "It's really tough out there."
Another issue in Baugh's testimony is health care. She knows many small-business owners have eliminated hospitalization on their on health-care policies to save money. Baugh, who owns Vanessa Fine Jewelry on Lakewood Ranch's Main Street, is active in leadership roles with both the Manatee and Sarasota Chamber's of Commerce, and she's also on the board of the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance.
Baugh says she realizes solutions will be just as tough to figure out as the problems themselves. Says Baugh: "We must do something quickly as businesses are drowning."
+ Bradenton bank losses one executive, gains another
Gerry Anthony, one of the grandfathers of community banking in Manatee County, is retiring from his position as chief executive of Bradenton-based Freedom Bank.
Anthony founded Freedom Bank in 2005 and he was part of a group that founded Bradenton-based Coast Bank of Florida in 2000 and American Bank in the late 1980s.
Freedom, and Coast before it, were two of several Gulf Coast community banks that struggled with underperforming loan issues over the past year or so; the problems at Coast, which ultimately led to the bank being sold, took place a few years after Anthony left.
And both Anthony and a Freedom Bank spokesman say his retirement is based strictly on age - not market challenges.
"When I reached my 65th birthday this past February, I realized the time had come to wind down my career and spend more time with my family," Anthony said in a statement. "I am grateful for having had the opportunity to work as banker in this vibrant community."
Anthony, a Vietnam veteran who moved from his native Ohio to Bradenton in 1974, couldn't be reached to elaborate on his retirement. A Freedom Bank official said Anthony approached the bank's board of directors a few months ago about his desire to retire and the board soon began searching for a replacement.
The bank found one in David Zuern, who was hired as chief executive officer and vice chairman of the board late last month. Anthony will stay on as president of the bank through Zuern's transition period.
Zuern has spent most of his banking career in Pennsylvania, where he worked for community banks, regional banks and the state regulatory office. Zuern served as the Pennsylvania State banking secretary under Gov. Tom Ridge in the 1990s, when he also worked on statewide economic development initiatives, according to a Freedom Bank statement.
Like any bank executive on the Gulf Coast these days, Zuern has a high stack of challenges awaiting him. For example, Freedom Bank's ratio of non-current loans to current loans shot up 477% between the end of 2006 and the end of 2007.
Going into 2008, the bank had $4.1 million in loans that were more than 90 days past due, according to data from the Federal Insurance Deposit Corp. Those loans represented 1.81% of the banks total loan portfolio of $230.2 million. In 2006, according to the FDIC data, only .38% of the bank's loan portfolio, $642,000 out of $168.8 million, was considered underperforming.
+ Software back-ups can cost a little and save a lot
Through last year, former IT professional Dave Miller was running Westcoasthost.com, a successful St. Petersburg-based Web hosting business. But then he thought of something else businesses needed: the software and hardware to back up valuable information on company hard drives.
So about eight months ago, Miller and four other employees opened an office in downtown St. Petersburg and created XZ Backup LLC, a business that will back up all the information on a client's hard drive, using servers in Tampa and Dallas.
Even though it's a crowded marketplace, Miller has quickly attracted clients from around the world. That includes the UK, Canada, Australia and India. Projected revenues this year: $700,000 to $800,000.
The company installs its software at the client's location. The software takes the files, compresses and encrypts them.
It then sends the data to the servers in Tampa. Those servers then replicate the information and send them to the servers in Texas, providing the redundancy.
"Sales are going good, although it's a very difficult product to present to someone via a Web site," says Miller, 37, the chief executive officer.
The cost of the service depends on the size and number of hard drive files, but many businesses can sign up for $29 to $39 a month, Miller says.
"It's a little more than $400 a year to have an insurance policy on your data," he says.
+ Recruiter narrows
the executive job search
The growing numbers of unemployed managers, supervisors and executives on the Gulf Coast and Florida could be a potential boon for at least one entrepreneur: Dan Nelson, an executive recruiter who previously held senior positions in sales and marketing for medical and logistics companies in Tennessee, recently opened a new statewide executive recruiting firm, based in Sarasota.
But this company, called CareerCampaigns, comes with a twist. Instead of working for the company seeking an executive, as most traditional executive search firms do, Nelson is working for the executive, serving as the individual's chief spokesman and "career campaign" manager. It's essentially reverse recruiting, says Nelson, who came up with the idea when he ran Orlando-based Career Management Strategies, a firm that focused on training executives before they took on new jobs.
"I'm playing the match.com of the industry," says Nelson. "We find top-notch candidates and deliver them directly to a hiring manager's inbox."
Nelson began researching the idea for this company about six months ago, first focusing on building databases of companies in several industries in the Tampa and Miami markets.
Nelson's next step will be to grow the database of employees, the clients he will help match with a job. He launched a Web site for the company last month and hopes to sign up about 10 to 15 executives a week, with the bulk of those being people who are out of work due to the weakening economy.
A client who signs up with Nelson prepares an elaborate profile that can be sent out to perspective employers. The profile includes a business portrait, a 30-second commercial audio clip heard over the Internet and a leadership and personality profile. Nelson says he will look for the features of each candidate that will help him or her stand out from the resume piles that grow deeper as the economy worsens.
One similarity that Nelson's business has with the traditional executive recruiting firm industry is its business model: The company that hires one of Nelson's clients pays CareerCampaigns a fee, which in Nelson's case will be about 10% of the new hire's annual salary.
The only cost to the candidate is a $95 photography fee, which could be refunded if and when he lands a job through CareerCampaigns. Nelson says he hopes to have an employee database for the Orlando and Jacksonville regions running by mid-summer and could expand to other parts of Florida later in the year.
More money-back
guarantees on condos
The West Bay Club, a condo community in South Lee County, is promising luxury condo buyers their money back after three years of ownership. The offer comes a few weeks after a Sarasota-based homebuilder and developer announced a similar three-year guarantee program.
The deal, West Bay Club deal, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, applies to about 200 condos priced between $480,000 and $2 million. Until June 1, every condo buyer will be guaranteed that the resort will either sell or buy back the residence at full purchase price after three years. Of course, the developers are betting that prices will have risen by then.
Last month, The Vineyards residential community in Naples promised it wouldn't sell 95 single-family homes in its inventory for less at a later date or the buyers will get a check for the difference.
Officials with West Bay Club, which is owned by Lehman Brothers Holdings and marketed by Prudential Douglas Elliman, couldn't be reached.
GULF COAST AUTO SALES
What the data shows: Taxable sales in this category include the sale of new and used cars, auto-supply stores and taxable sales at gasoline stations.
What it means: It's no surprise that the real-estate induced downturn is hurting auto sales in Florida. However, auto-related sales in Naples, Punta Gorda and Tampa fell less than the state as a whole on a percentage basis. Sarasota and Fort Myers fared worse.
Forecast: If the unemployment rate keeps rising and the real estate market continues to decline, auto sales are likely to continue to suffer. Also, banks have started tightening lending requirements and that's likely to crimp sales further. One bright spot may be with auto-supply stores, as more people repair their older cars instead of buying a new one.
february auto sales
($ in millions)
Area Taxable auto sales Annual change
Fort Myers $152.4 16%
Naples $68.3 9%
Punta Gorda $25.8 6%
Sarasota $145.5 14%
Tampa $603.1 9%
Florida $4,134.3 11%
Source: Florida Legislature Office of Economic & Demographic Research
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