04/14/06

Steve Baumann column

Don't blink, it's changing every week

Here's the news:

Englewood has been discovered.

But you already knew that.

Still, it never seems to surprise people when they see it spelled out clearly.

That's what Lane Deidrick, the president of Englewood Bank, did for members of the Englewood Area Planning Advisory Board Thursday morning.

Deidrick brought his PowerPoint presentation along and gave everyone a virtual bus tour of the town with a rundown of commercial and residential projects underway in Englewood.

"Clearly, you can see Englewood is in a state of transition," he said.

Fifteen minutes into the talk, he expanded on that understatement: "You can drive down the roads and miss a week, and then see something new."

Now, that's transition.

Deidrick's tour began on Gasparilla Road, circled Cape Haze, took a turn down Manasota Key, then headed back around the rest of the town.

Here's a list of the projects under construction:

Placida Plaza, U.S. Homes, Fiddler's Green, Anglers Club, Boca Vista, The Landings, Preserve at Windward, Cape Haze Resort, The Hacienda, Cape Haze Marina Bay, The Hammocks. These are all along the arc of County Roads 771 and 775.

"That whole corridor is very active. If you drive down there, don't miss a day," Deidrick said.

Continue into Rotonda:

Gasparilla Condos, Sapphire Point, Gasparilla Palms, Grand Preserve.

Twenty units here, 48 units there.

Back out near the Publix:

Winstan Palms, Mariners Landing, Red Fish Key Villas, Harborview Condos.

Over to Manasota Key:

Barefoot Beach, The Palms, Sunrise Point, Gulf Island Strand, Sea Spray, Boulder Pointe, Gulf Breeze, Venetian Sands.

Back through town:

Hebblewhite Court, Boca Royale, Kimball Hill, Ventura Village, Pennington Place, Oak Forest, McCall Lake, Royal Palm Marina, Westgate Condominiums, Condos at Lemon Bay, Westfield and Stillwater II.

And that's not to mention the smaller commercial projects; he did, but I won't.

It's a little here, a little there; a lot here, a lot there.

Added up, Deidrick's numbers came to 2,503 units with a potential sales value of $1,127,625,000. That's over $1 billion, if you got lost in the zeros.

And the average unit price, he noted, was $650,000.

But those are only the projects that have broken ground. Another PowerPoint segment listed developments brought to Charlotte County since the first of the year. Those took up two and a half pages, tightly spaced.

He also guessed that 40-50 percent of the early sales was from investors hoping to buy cheap and flip the property as the prices hopped.

The big investment money (80-90 percent) is coming from the north (Sarasota) and the south (Naples) and from out of state, he said.

"I guess they've found Englewood," board member Ken Kleinlein said.

"Yes, we've been found," Deidrick said.

But you knew that.

Deidrick invited board members to drop him an e-mail if they stumbled onto a new project, because he was having a tough time keeping up.

There's just so much time a banker can spend driving around keeping track of his community's transition.

http://www.sun-herald.com/NewsArchive2/041406/ew5.htm?date=041406&story=ew5.htm