"And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun"

"The near and the dear ones, the old and the young"
late great John lennon

I feel rather sad that the shuttle is coming to an end and even Bernards Surf has closed.  I can remember in elementary school, they used to let us out to see the missle launchs.  It was always exciting since there were a lot of failures.  Thank God at that time they were unmaned, not even a monkey.

It naturally has been a slow week in our complexes; the biggest happening is the foreclosure in Windward East located on the 7th floor with good side views. The unit has 2 bedrooms 2 baths and a 1 car garage. Now priced at $199,900!


For most of you who have been in the Real Estate business for a while remember that it used to be imperative to act quickly to get that ocean front condo. It has now became the norm to wait for the price reduction to make an offer and then think it is someone else who is at fault because they didn’t get the property because of multiple offers. The latest thing we are seeing in the business is for the buyer to make an offer on a foreclosed property and get their offer accepted by the lender. The buyer then will assume they could have got the property at a lower price. They then will withdraw the offer and wait for it to come back on the market. What is not understood is that the property will come back on the market but at a higher price because of the activity.



We also still have the ridiculous law in place that lenders and sellers have to use the appraiser on the list regardless of where they are located, we still have appraisers from Orlando and Tampa appraising Brevard County property. We have had appraisers using river front condos to comp ocean front condos, river front homes to comp canal front homes. We even have an appraiser comp a south Merritt Island home to a West Melbourne home. This accounts for the price reductions you will see on foreclosed properties.



The moral of the story is if you want to buy a property then ask your agent to give you comps on the property of interest and give you an opinion on what the property’s market value is in today’s market. We always write a cover letter with offers with the comps and ask the listing agent to submit this info to the seller. This usually will carry some weight in acquiring the property.



We hope you have a Happy Holiday season!



Jim Bagwell