Thursday, July 08, 2010

Oily Incentives for a Disappearing Beach Real Estate Market

The BP oil spill has pushed Pensacola Beach real estate sales off a cliff. A local broker told us yesterday her phone has gone dead. Prospective buyers have disappeared. She has no hope that things will improve, either.

Apart from business, she's personally so distressed that she's seriously considering moving away.

"The beach will never be the same," the broker told us. "Even if they eventually stop the leak tarballs will continue washing up on the beach and getting buried in the sand for years. My child will never know the beach like I have. It makes me want to cry."

Coincidentally, PNJ columnist Mark O'Brien mentioned on his newspaper blog space a similarly dismal picture for Perdido Key real estate. "[A] month that might have brought 30 sales on Perdido Key," he writes, "drew merely six in June."

This drew a response from one of Mark's readers. "YouAreNotBob" noted a shockingly thin crowd gathered on Pensacola Beach yesterday to watch the Blue Angels practice. He predicts for Pensacola Beach:
Beach businesses will start closing before long and the real estate on all the businesses will suffer as badly as Perdido Key. There will eventually be a disastrous reduction in revenue to local government. A public dialogue needs to begin RIGHT NOW to debate what form the reaction to this should take.
Hey! We have an idea for county government. Why not offer tax incentives to Pensacola Beach home buyers and businesses to stimulate interest in buying, just as governments often do when they want to attract new industries? Something like, say, 99-year leases "with no ad valorem taxes or assessments on property or improvements."

Escambia County's word is its bond, right? After all, what could go wrong?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Make sure and thank your politicians who thought it was OK to have offshore drilling.

One other question for the poor folks of the Gulf Coast - how do you like driving that SUV now?

Anonymous said...

Well, the folks who live at the beach now have an emotional and community attachment to the island and are the very folks that are needed to observe and report on what occurs on those shores. If folks at the beach start to abandon Paradise, those properties will be bought up by folks who may not hold affection for the place and simply consider a purchase one in which time will mean money. Or bought by BP, heaven forbid.
When property values fall, so does taxable value...I know, I know, lots of broken promises here in the Panhandle.

escort milano said...

Well, I do not actually imagine it is likely to have success.