Residential real estate round table: the boom times are upon us but for how much longer and who will be able to afford to live in South Florida? A special report

South Florida CEO, Jan-Feb, 2005

Steven J. Beauchamp: That happened in Fort Lauderdale, and you were the recipient of the backlash. When George Platt was pulled out of office and Cindi Hutchinson became the commissioner and we went through this process where they're trying to protect all the pieces of the land they could. It would be nice to see something besides that old Hyde Park shopping center that's been closed down. It's kind of spun the other way a little bit and they're starting to realize they got to build more density into downtown, and they're already talking about adding maybe 12,000 to 14,000 more units in the core downtown. And of course we get right back to the issue of how are we going to service those people. They're trying to come up with a long-term solution with a light rail of some sort, to tie, in a very unique way, Broward County to downtown to the airport.

SFCEO: Miami Beach and Miami are moving forward on a light rail system.

Wolfe: Since we have two developments on the FEC line, I think that's going to be like manna. I don't know how many people realize the FEC line runs from West Palm to downtown Miami through almost every major city along the east coast. I mean, you can't get from Aventura to downtown Miami in under an hour at almost any point of the day. Aventura is two blocks away from the FEC line.

SFCEO: I'll believe it when I see it.

Wolfe: [Coral] Gables has the trolleys, and it works--a lot of people use it.

SFCEO: But at some point almost all of those people using the Coral Gables trolley drove their cars and parked them somewhere. Where do you put the parking if land is at a premium?

Kasdin: If you view it as a spine with hubs, you can. You're not going to connect everybody. The notion that you can send a Metrorail line out to far southwest Dade and efficiently pick up people isn't true, but you take our concentrated urban core areas--downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, West Palm Beach--and you create sufficient densities and put a finer-grain transit system. A streetcar system, just like we're doing in Miami Beach and Miami. And in that fashion you can actually get a lot of people moving around within the urban core without even having to use their car.

SFCEO: What trends are you seeing in the activity in terms of financing residential projects?

Beauchamp: There's just a constant flow of people that have never done something before that are coming in and looking for money, and there are banks out there that will give them the money. We just finished a condo project in Tampa with a developer who has been in business for 25 years. He's built probably 15 condos. It's two towers on Tampa Bay and he needed $5 million of equity. He started out with three banks vying for the business. By the end of the day, one bank offered him a construction loan and the first deposits, 10 percent he got credit for, the second, with a bond, he got credit for, and he got total credit for the appreciation of the land, which doubled from $40,000 a unit to $100,000 a unit in six months. He doesn't need equity anymore. He doesn't even need his country club equity sources. That's how interesting the market has become.