Flipping Florida: A Fixer-Upper With Potential

Flipping” real estate is as endemic to our region as an evening sky tinted with the pastels of a Fragonard or a manatee with propeller marks. In 2006, ABC’s 20/20 named Florida one of the hottest real estate markets in the nation, with flipping returns in certain preconstruction sites as high as 400 percent. Television specials with titles like Flip This House and Flip That House showed viewers how it was done. Then, just as everyone was getting the hang of leverage and carrying costs, and buying a handyman special and ripping up the floor joists, the bubble burst, with a market as collapsed as the skin of the airship Hindenberg.

Florida’s recent flipping frenzy is small potatoes compared to the boom of the 1920s when knicker-clad salesmen called “binder boys” worked the streets and storefronts, selling “binders,” 10 percent deposits on parcels of real estate then flipping the binders several times in a single day.

It wasn’t long before the first shovel-faced alligator to poke its snout between the sawgrass gave the game away. Some of the parcels – okay, a lot of the parcels – were under water! Soon after, a strong anti-Florida campaign swept the nation. Every major magazine ran an exposé and northern bankers, complaining that hucksters were selling a birdbath, began warning their clients not to invest in Florida real estate.

While our peninsula has been the subject of flipping, it has also been the object. Florida, like the continent itself, has changed hands many times. Not listed in the official Chain of Title are the native populations who migrated across the Bering land bridge 15,000 years ago, Phoenician businessmen, Egyptians, The Lost Tribes of Israel, 6th century St. Brendan (who set sail from Ireland in a curragh with 14 monks), Polynesians, Basque fishermen, and Mansa Muhammed of Mali from the medieval West African civilization of the Mandinka.

Read the entire article in the March 2009 issue