Celebration Life

As of this evening, there are 232 properties for sale here in Celebration, according to the Mid-Florida MLS. Here are some key statistics:

• Eight properties are less than $100,000!
• The least expensive single family home is a 3 bed/2ba single family home in Celebration’s North Village, offered at $219,000
• There are 51 homes listed between $100,000 and $199,999
• There are 45 homes listed between $200,000 and $299,999
• There are 38 homes listed between $300,000 and $399,999

These prices represent excellent opportunity to live in the groundbreaking new urban community of Celebration, FL. Most of the homes are located within a 20 minute walk of the downtown area, a vibrant shopping district with unique shops and restaurants.

If you’re not ready to buy but are still interested in living here, there are 50 homes on the MLS available for rent, with rates ranging from cosy garage apartments to a $5800/mo 6 bed/5ba estate home with 5865 sqft.

Feel free to reach out to us if you’d like free, detailed information on what’s currently available.

Article: WSJ.com: A Walker’s Guide to Home Buying

For a few years in the early 2000′s, I lived in South Tampa and worked in central New Jersey (Somerset County). Monday mornings I woke up bright (well…) and early, hopped on a plane, and was to my cube in Raritan by lunchtime. On Fridays I’d head to Newark around lunchtime, catch the 2:50 to Tampa, and be back home in time for happy hour. Rinse, repeat. During the week I was staying in a rented room in Stewartsville, about 35 miles from work, which took anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour each way. Point is, there was a lot of time spent in cars and planes. Enough time to know that I didn’t want to do it any more.

When presented with the opportunity to move to either Tampa or Orlando, there wasn’t much debate. We chose Celebration. Within a 25 minute walk, or 10 minute bike ride, I can visit my choice of banks, grab a Starbucks coffee, drop the son off at the K-8 school, work on an MBA, drop off drycleaning, check my PO box, get a haircut, have pad thai or sushi, see a movie, or visit a friend at our hospital. And most Celebration residents live closer to the downtown than we do.

I’ve lived in Florida for 30+ years, cumulatively. This degree of walkability is not easy to come by. Yes, it’s factored into the real estate prices here in Celebration, but to some degree that investment has been recouped in the form of fewer fillups (and lower dependence on oil), lower auto insurance premiums, reduced chances of getting in an accident, and improved health through increased exercise.

And if it means I spend more time enjoying the outdoors with my family, then it’s priceless. Hopefully others will discover this, too.

Here’s an interesting item. It’s not strictly Celebration, per se, but has enough similarities with here that I’ll include it here anyway.

The Walt Disney Company announced today the start of pre-sales for Golden Oak. “a one-of-a-kind luxury residential resort community offering the unprecedented opportunity to purchase a home at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida” (from the press release).

It’s the “on property” aspect of this that I find most interesting. For those of you familiar with the layout of Walt Disney World property, this is just east of Fort Wilderness, so it’s really quite close to everything Disney.

I won’t recite the press release verbatim — you can read it here if you’d like — but the bullet points are:

• Single family custom homes priced between $1.5 and $8 million
• Fewer than 30 to start, with completion in 2011
• Full ownership by means of deed
• Gated
• Eventual footprint of 980 acres, about half of which is conservation area
• Residents will have access to amenities at a previously announced Four Seasons
• Total build-out plan is for 450 homes
• $25k refundable deposit in first-come order

As a resident of Celebration, another Walt Disney “Imagineered” community, I’ll be interested to follow the progress of this new development. What are your thoughts? Disney’s a smart company and has done its homework, but is there pent up demand for this kind of development? What problems might you foresee?

Guess who went from Celebration renter to Celebration owner yesterday morning?

Yep, we’ve moved! It was about the shortest move you can make — across a park, past some condos, and 4 houses — and yet, that didn’t make it all that much simpler. It seems whether you’re loading a dresser onto a truck to drive it 1 mile or to drive it 50, it ends up weighing about the same.

We’ve been blessed to find a house here in Celebration that we can afford AND meets our needs. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. We made our offer in late July, and it finally closed on Feb 8. We were lucky in that the previous owners treated the house with the care it deserves, so it was move-in ready. We were literally moving in our stuff within an hour of closing, no painting or deep-cleaning necessary.

Now begins the process of turning this house into a home. There are many boxes that stand in the way.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, Celebration residents and visitors!

Things to look forward to in the New Year, in no particular order (‘cept the first one):

• We will move into a house. We’ve been patiently waiting out the purchase of a home via short sale. It’s been a long road, one that started mid-July. I think the end may be in sight, but that may just be an illusion brought on by extreme temperature changes.
• House projects. Related to the above, my list of house projects is officially empty. My expectation is that moving into a 7 year old house vs the 37 year old one we moved out of will translate into a shorter house project list, but maybe that’s hilariously naive?
• Grill! Also related to moving into a house will be bringing the grill out of storage. Not being able to grill despite so many fantastic grilling days here in Florida has been like living in a straightjacket.
• New businesses. The arcade next to Kilwin’s is shuttering its doors, I believe at the end of January. There’s also another spot still available on Market Street where the Village Merc used to be. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of businesses choose to open their doors this year; I’ll be sure to write about them here when they do. I’d love to see a small corner market type store here in Celebration… you know, things like milk, eggs, chips, beers, some staple produce. That, coupled with the produce stand at the Sunday market, would mean we only have to leave the bubble for meat!
• Geocaching. Did you know there are several geocaches stashed away around Celebration? If you don’t know what geocaching is, you should check out geocaching.com. You’ll need a handheld GPS and a sense of adventure. You might even be able to get by with an iPhone 3G or 3GS and the right GPS app. It’s a great family-friendly excuse to get outside for a few hours to see parts of the world you may not otherwise have seen… and get a little exercise, to boot. Our new GPS arrives Wednesday so we can find & log the caches we haven’t found yet.
• Epcot After 4. Looking forward to getting the maximum return on our brand spanking new Epcot After 4 annual passes!
• Meeting neighbors and making friends. Once our five month old is a little older, we’d like to be a bit more social again. “How so?”, one might ask. Good question.
• Tennis! I’ve been trying to take tennis lessons and get to the point where the other person I’m playing with won’t want to slice me with a rusty razor blade after 10 minutes. I’ve had some trouble maintaining a consistent training schedule with my coach but expect to work something out in the next few weeks. If you’re an OK tennis player (or a good tennis player with plenty of patience) and live in Celebration, drop me a note at blogmail at celebrationblog.com.
• GREAT food. Bangers & Mash at Shannon’s. Stackers and Clam Chowder at the Town Tavern (and I’ve been neglecting my beer checklist). Pad Thai (4 star hot) at Thai Thani. That mozzarella/basil/balsamic flatbread thing at Imperium. Lunchtime California Combination at Seito Sushi. Tapas and Cuban bread like I remember from Tampa at Columbia Celebration. And I hope to frequent Cafe D’Antonio, Angelinas, and Jean Pierre’s Bistro more often as we find babysitters. Celebration is truly a place for great food.

What am I missing? What else do Celebration residents have to look forward to in 2010 and beyond?

More delays on getting the house. Of course, it’s a short sale, so that’s to be expected, but still… this will push us up against the Christmas holidays for move-in time.

In the meantime, the real estate inventory here in Celebration seems to have cooled some with respect to available inventory. That’s good for home owners, less good for home buyers. Of course, I can’t back this up with data, it’s just that the ‘New Listing’ or ‘Price Reduced’ emails we get from our agent have tapered off somewhat. Could be seasonal, too. Only the fancy people with the MLS access know for sure.

On a positive note, at least we’ll be moving when it’s cooler out!

We added a new Celebration resident on Monday. Our little family of two grew by one when my wife delivered our son into this world on Monday, August 10, at Florida Hospital in Celebration. Both mommy and baby are happy and healthy!

I can’t say enough great things about Dr. David Marcantel and the fantastic staff there on the fourth floor in The Baby Place. The nurses there were very professional in their jobs, and knew exactly the right tone to strike during the emotional event of long labor, the birth itself, and the recovery. They were kind but authoritative, and, with the exception of one individual, never made us feel dumb when answering our first-time-parent questions.

So now you know why there haven’t been any updates lately!

This is an interesting article on Celebration from the Washington Post.

I’ve avoided real estate discussions here for several reasons:

1. We don’t yet own real estate here. In that regard we still have something of an outsider’s perspective in that we don’t have a stake in the owners association.
2. It might be a sore subject for people who have been through the boom and bust of real estate prices here.
3. While Celebration real estate discussions interest me personally, it may have been beat to death.

So while we’re not Celebration owners yet, we are actively shopping. We’ve been following MLS listings and comps of sold properties diligently since the beginning of the year when we decided to move here, so I feel we have a better-than-the-average-person perspective on the low end of the market here. Our timing, coming from Pennsylvania when we did, looks like it will benefit us, but we’re conscious of what effect the pricing drop has beyond our own wallet, and how it can tear at the fabric of the community.

There are many houses that are obviously vacant (lock box, and the yard is trashed) or subtly vacant (property kept up, but lock box and extra newspapers and fliers around). The list of homes with short sale contingencies is large. And there are even postings on the internal Celebration message boards about alleged squatters and expensive vandalism. All of these are clearly negative to the community. The question is how the community will adapt to these conditions until they improve (and yes, they will improve because, face it, Celebration satisfies many of the criteria used when looking for a place to settle).

On a personal note, obviously we’d like it if real estate prices were at their bottom the day we made our offer, and only go up from there. Will that happen? Probably not. But we try to be aware of the impact — positive and negative — that lower prices will have on the community that we’re buying in to. We’re committed to Celebration for the foreseeable future, either as renters or owners, so we want to understand what the challenges are and how we can help the community overcome them.

Any additional insight in the comments area is welcome.