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Coffee Talk
+ USF grads head
to Wall Street
Two University of South Florida grads snagged what is often viewed as a dream job for aspiring finance or accounting students: analyst positions at Goldman Sachs in New York City.
The investment banking and securities firm, which has been dubbed by the New York Times as "without peer in the world of finance," provides financial advice to some of the most important companies, largest governments, and wealthiest families around the globe.
Given the firm's reputation for recruiting from schools such as Harvard, Wharton, and Columbia, the two offers to USF grads (on the company's inaugural trip to USF) has the USF business school beaming.
Daniel Rojas, 22, and Jacqueline Blake, 23, both 2007 USF graduates, went through two rounds of interviews at Goldman before being offered jobs at the company's Wall Street headquarters.
+ Bare offers tips
for entrepreneurs
Warren Bare is a successful Internet entrepreneur who loves changing the rules. His current company, Jobkabob, is growing quickly and helping change the way people look at Internet recruiting.
The road to revolutionizing the "job search" in the U.S. actually began for Bare in the mid 1990s, when he launched Headhunter.net. At the time there were already dozens of well-established competitors, including Monster.com, but Bare broke into the space by introducing a disruptive pay-for-position business model, which has since become popular with search engines.
Headhunter grew quickly and was purchased after the tech bubble for $200 million. Headhunter is now known as CareerBuilder, the largest U.S. revenue producer in the online recruitment advertising space.
After Headhunter, Bare launched InJesus, an Internet company focused on helping Christian missionaries and ministries communicate. This space also had competition.
While InJesus was launching, Christianity.com raised and burned $50 million and Crosswalk raised and burned $30 million. With millions of active users, InJesus is now the largest Christian communications network on the Internet.
Frustrated that the 10-year-old Internet recruiting industry was still broken, in 2004 Bare launched Jobkabob to change the way people find jobs and is again growing a site.
Bare graduated in 1987 from the University of South Florida with a major in finance and a minor in economics.
Here are his tips for entrepreneurs:
• Understand and accept the inherent risks.
• Remember that you're probably wrong most of the time.
• Stick with your core concept and figure out what is right.
• Set limits on what you are willing to risk and who or what you are willing to hurt to achieve success.
• Let others, such as customers, be your marketing team.
+ Homebuilder goes
truly affordable
It took Lakewood Ranch homebuilder Pat Neal only a few months to do what various Gulf Coast government agencies and bureaucracies have failed to accomplish for years: Build and sell legitimate affordable housing.
The collapsing real estate market drove the announcement that Neal Communities would be selling a series of cottage-style homes in the Forest Creek subdivision of Parrish for under $154,000 and as low as $122,900. The move was an immediate hit when homes went on sale Feb. 22.
The company sold eight of the small cottage homes, plus one larger home, in the first three days. And then over the next week it sold another 14 of the lower-priced homes.
The weekend of Feb. 23 was so busy, Neal told Coffee Talk recently, that he called four employees to come to the office to help put together brochures. Sales associates estimated that more than 1,000 people looked around the homes over that first weekend, which was also the debut of the annual Home Builders Association Parade of Homes.
"We expected to have some interest," says Neal. "But the interest is way more than we ever predicted."
The low-end models in Forest Creek, which are about 1,200 square feet, have two bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus a rear garage. A dishwasher and a stove are included with the price, but there are few other upgrades at the base price.
What's more, the interest isn't only from potential homeowners. Pulte Homes recently began selling homes in the $120,000 price range in Harrison Ranch, near Forest Creek, and Neal says he wouldn't be surprised if more homebuilders began following this lower-priced model.
The homes are true affordable housing, too, priced almost $40,000 less then what Manatee County officials have previously designated as the affordable housing threshold. It's also about $120,000 less then the median home price in the Sarasota-Bradenton market.
Neal, who for most of the past decade has sold homes to retirees and a higher-end demographic, says he hasn't sold homes of any size for $129,000 since 1991, and 1989 was the last time he sold homes as low as $122,000. The company plans to sell about 70 homes in this range and then raise the prices, a move Neal hopes will coincide with the beginnings of a rebound in the market, which he says is "already seeing the first tentative signs of a bounce."
+ WCI delays annual report,
forecasts $700 million loss
A regulatory filing by Bonita Springs-based WCI Communities on Feb. 29 shows just how bad a year 2007 has been for the homebuilder.
WCI says it anticipates losses of up to $700 million from continuing operations in 2007 in a filing that warned it would be late publishing its annual report. About $425 million of that loss was due to real estate impairment charges. The company's stock fell 6% on March 3 to $3.65, the first trading day after the filing.
In addition, WCI warned revenues will only total about $950 million in 2007, or about half of the company's revenues in 2006, because of the residential real estate downturn. It plans to file its annual report no later than March 17 due to "the unexpected length of time needed to complete detailed impairment analyses for its real estate inventories, goodwill and investments in joint ventures."
+ Entrepreneurs vow to make good on new magazine
The magazine publishing industry, both in Florida and nationwide, has had it share of struggles recently, yet another side effect of the housing market slump.
But two Sarasota entrepreneurs are betting there is room for a new magazine aimed at soon-to-be Gulf Coast brides.
Susan Cavanaugh, president and publisher of the magazine to be called Nuovo Bride, says the wedding industry is virtually recession-proof and what's more, the number of nuptials statewide is predicted to rise in the next three years.
The plan, says Cavanaugh, is to publish an elegant, glossy magazine four times a year with a chronological-based format of stories and advertisements, from an engagement through a honeymoon. The magazine will initially be distributed at bridal shows and sent by direct mail to future brides and grooms in the Sarasota and Bradenton market, but Cavanaugh hopes to eventually expand the magazine's reach to Tampa and Naples, too.
Cavanaugh and the bridal magazine's executive editor, Beth Winkle, have worked together for the past eight years at Gulf Coast family living, a free magazine distributed six times a year in the Sarasota-Bradenton area.
Winkle, who founded Gulf Coast family living, sees Nuovo Bride as a chance to make something positive out of difficult market. Says Winkle: "I'm a big believer that when the market is bad, people need to do something."
+ Lee foreclosure
bottom in sight
Lee County Clerk of Court Charlie Green says the civil division is "buried in cases" from the foreclosure wave that topped 2,400 filings last month.
But Green says the worst may be over. "I think we've bottomed," Green told a gathering of BUPAC, a politically active group of executives and retirees in Fort Myers.
However, the situation won't improve overnight because foreclosures will "skip along the bottom" for some time. For now, Green estimates, the majority of foreclosures are on homes bought by speculators during the boom rather than residents.
+ Dinner theater opening
lingers even longer
Talk about drama.
It has been almost four years since Sarasota-based dinner theater operator Robert Ennis Turoff signed an agreement to build a Golden Apple Dinner Theater in Lakewood Ranch, an anchor in a new commercial development.
It has been more than two years since construction began.
Yet as of early March, the theater was still just a shell of a building, with no curtains, seats or ticket booths. While permitting delays have recently given way to financing worries, Turoff is still confident the theater will open. His latest projection: The first show will debut by September or October of 2008.
The theater is the biggest component of the San Marco Plaza, a retail project run by Sarasota developer Gary Moyer, who is planning to bring the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to downtown Sarasota in another theater-centric project, known as the Proscenium. San Marco Plaza, which includes a Barnie's Coffee and Häagen-Daz ice cream store, has been open for more than a year.
Those stores and restaurants require a much simpler permitting process than the dinner theater, says Turoff and the project's lead contractor, Ed Zankey of Sarasota-based Harbor Key Development. "It's a very complicated build-out," Zankey tells Coffee Talk. "It's like a structure within a structure."
After more than a year of revisions and waiting for Manatee County approvals, the three-story building has finally received permits for those complicated parts, such as the balcony and stage area, says Zankey. As of March 3, the only permit approval left was a site plan clarification from Manatee County officials.
If and when that approval finally comes through, Turoff could then focus on financing - no easy task itself today.
AUTOMOBILE SALES
What the data shows: The category of autos and accessories includes taxable sales of new and used cars, repair shops, auto-supply shops and sales at gas stations. All areas of the Gulf Coast except Naples showed double-digit percentage declines in November compared with the same month a year ago.
What it means: The construction downturn and spreading economic uncertainty have slowed consumer spending on big-ticket items such as cars. The decline was especially pronounced in Fort Myers. Interestingly, auto sales declined the least in nearby Naples though the sales volume there is half what it is in Fort Myers. The Gulf Coast's largest car market in Tampa mirrored the statewide drop.
Forecast: It's not likely auto sales will rise any time soon as car makers have been reporting slow sales so far this year. However, year-over-year declines in the coming year may not be as dramatic if the economy recovers later this year.
November Auto Sales ($ in millions)
Taxable sales % Chg.
Area of autos (year-over-year)
Fort Myers $142.7 ‑21%
Naples $73 ‑5%
Punta Gorda $23.8 ‑17%
Sarasota $143.2 ‑16%
Tampa $579.6 ‑10%
Florida $4,029.9 ‑11%
Source: Florida Legislature Office of Economic and Demographic Research
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