Hot Properties... But Will They Sell?

A recovering housing market should make Doug Thompson happy. As the owner of Doug Thompson Photography, most of his income comes from shooting ritzy pictorials of million-dollar listings. When the Southwest Florida luxury real estate market cratered during summer 2009,
his business disappeared.

The time off did provide his first vacation in years. “So I built a boat on top of a swamp buggy,” he says. He was planning to freak out some Caloosahatchee river revelers—if only he had a few more weeks.
But by the time season rolled around, buyers were ready to snap up prime luxury properties selling for basement prices. Realtors again began shelling out $2,400 a day for his services, and Thompson had to go back to work. By November, his schedule was booked two weeks out.

The message was clear: Vacation’s over. The Southwest Florida luxury market isn’t back, but it’s getting there.

In 2008, 155 luxury homes ($1 million-plus) were sold in Fort Myers. One year later, homebuyers purchased only 85. The Naples Area Board of Realtors (NABOR) also reported a 21 percent decrease in closings of properties over $1 million in ’09.

However, the numbers are slowly improving in 2010. NABOR recorded 130 closings during the first quarter, compared with 91 during the same period last year. The number of luxury homes sold in Fort Myers doubled in January from the same month in ’08 and remained fairly steady during the first quarter.

“The high-end market is starting to recover,” says Brenda Fioretti, president of NABOR. “The consumers’ confidence has improved, and savvy buyers realize that we’ve reached the bottom of home prices and they’re going to slowly creep back up.”

To find out what’s changed in the luxury market post-recession, we talked to three realtors in three different stages of selling multimillion-dollar homes. We found a marketplace where price controls the action far more than before the bust.

11410 Dickey Lane, Captiva

Mike McMurray—a realtor who, with Trevor Nette, works Captiva and Sanibel islands for VIP Realty—hires Thompson to photograph a large white mansion on Captiva Island over a weekend in March, but unfavorable conditions force him to delay the shoot. There are threatening gray clouds one day, and a wooden stake supporting a freshly planted tree the next. “No, no, no,” McMurray says. “No one wants to see a stick holding up a coconut tree.”

The weather and the landscaping finally cooperate on Monday, and Thompson spends the next two days—12 hours, earning roughly $4,800—capturing every cranny of the 6,677-square-foot, five-bedroom mansion. There are pictures of the closets, the pier, the pier at dusk, the tri-faucet continuously dripping water into the infinity pool, etc.

As Thompson canvasses the home, the owners and McMurray celebrate the start of the selling process. Drinks are poured, Michael Bublé croons from the surround sound, and they laugh a lot.

For Craig and Susan Scott, the owners who built the house, with Susan serving as co-architect, it’s time to put away their construction helmets and turn the heavy lifting over to McMurray. For McMurray, adding a mansion on the tip of Captiva Island to his portfolio is a boon. Selling it would also pad the pocketbook.

Everyone is happy—for now.

The Scotts agree to ask $8.9 million for the house they’ve lived in for only three days. And they are motivated sellers, allowing Nette and McMurray to parade prospective buyers through the house at will, a rarity in the luxury housing game.

They want to sell because they have even grander ideas for the lot next door. That’s where Susan plans to build her next creation, after offloading this one. “It’s a pretty expensive hobby,” she says. “But our penalty if we don’t sell is we have to live here.”

We can think of worse consequences. On a tour of the home, Susan points out the orange light fixtures designed to resemble ostrich eggs, the art/dance
studio, the Darryl Pottorf artwork hanging on the wall and Bob Rauschenberg’s stilt-house studio just off the mansion’s shoreline. The Scotts’ house is a beautifully simplistic mix of Old Florida, with its white walls and metal roof, and grandeur.

It’s McMurray’s job to serve as the pragmatic optimist, at once exhibiting confidence of a sell, but at the same time cautioning his clients about the lukewarm temperature of the market. And despite the drinks, music and revelry, McMurray understands that a revolution has taken hold of the luxury market.

“Not for a long time has [this market] adjusted in price toward the buyer’s favor,” he says. “Not only do we see sellers, but sellers that have some pretty incredible properties. An average market never gets these types of properties. But the cream of the crop will be picked off first. And there’s only so much cream at the top.”

By late May, the Captiva house is still on the market. There are no plans to slash the price. Instead, they continue to wait for the right buyer in a marketplace that offers fewer and fewer of them.

“The high-end market has been spotty,” McMurray says. “You see only so many guys who come into the market who can afford a house like this.”

6515 Thomas Jefferson Court, Naples

 

Outside a home she was showing in Pelican Bay, Victoria Harrison looks quizzically at the houses on either side of the property. “You know,” she says, “I think I sold both of those houses.” Down the same street, there’s a “for sale” sign bearing her name. Her ads appear regularly in the Pelican Bay Post.

Harrison, a realtor for Downing Frye in Naples, casts a long shadow in Pelican Bay.