VERO BEACH — Minor League Baseball is going to take a swing at a name other than Dodgertown to sell the 65-acre complex that has worn that name since the late 1940s. (more…)

When Michelle Holmes, bought her Martin County town house, she never thought she’d be securing a loan guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It was really easy to work through,” Holmes said about buying her $120,000 town home late last year. “It had a really quick turnaround time.”

Without a down payment and good credit score, she was able to secure a Rural Development Home Loan, backed by the USDA, through Palm City-based East Coast Mortgage Lenders.
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Along with status and prestige, Treasure Coast celebrities and CEOs bring in beaucoup bucks to the local tax collector’s offices.

Pop star Celine Dion just shelled out $171,040 in property taxes for her 3.7-acre oceanfront Jupiter Island estate on the 200 block of South Beach Road.

Dion’s estate, which is registered under her Montreal-based company Renlec Management Inc., is on the same street as Richard Fuld Jr., the former chairman and chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers. He changed ownership of the $13.3 million Jupiter Island home on 265 Beach Road exclusively into his wife’s name almost two months after the company had the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

Public records show the couple plunked down $197,194 in property taxes on Nov. 11.

Professional golfer Greg Norman, who slashed the price of his famous barrier-island estate from $65 million to $47.5 million last year, also shares the same ZIP code as the Fulds and Dion. Tax records show Norman paid a whopping $326,751 in residential taxes last January on his 8-acre property, named “Tranquility,” at 382 South Beach Road.

Tiger Wood’s 12-acre site on the 400 block of South Beach Road still is under construction, but his future property taxes could beat out Norman’s bill in the future.

County records show Sand Turtle LLC, the entity registered as the owner of the Woods property, paid a $70,744 tax bill in November. Woods is building a 10,000-square-foot, two-story home with an elevator, guest house, guardhouse and boathouse. The property stretches from the Intracoastal Waterway to the Atlantic Ocean.

Taxes seem a little more reasonable in Indian River County. Author and journalist Carl Hiaasen and his wife Fenia paid Vero Beach their $16,988 property tax bill on Nov. 5.

“I think these people, the celebrities, we do have here are very quiet about it,” said Janet Vizzo, a manager at the Martin County Tax Collector’s Office. “It’s not very well known.” (more…)

STUART — A jailed Jensen Beach pastor accused of bilking investors out of more than $8 million in fraudulent real estate schemes will act as his own attorney at his trial set for March 23, a judge ruled Thursday.

Rodney McGill and his wife, Shalonda McGill, were arrested in September, and charged with racketeering, first-degree grand theft, obtaining a mortgage by false representation and other counts.

But if McGill gets his way, his trial won’t take place in Martin County — a point he repeated to Circuit Judge Sherwood Bauer.
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FORT PIERCE — Despite the Florida sunshine, a nationwide report by California-based ZipRealty that tracks the hottest ZIP codes nationwide pegged an area of Fort Pierce as not being so hot.

The report, which tracks how offers submitted by buyers and accepted by sellers compares to a home’s original list price, said 81.75 percent of all homebuyers gave lowball offers to sellers in Fort Pierce’s 34949 ZIP code. (more…)

The Treasure Coast has always attracted seasonal residents from the Midwest and northern states.
But lately, a different type of buyer has started to purchase vacation and retirement homes in Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties.

“We’re only going to live here six months of the year,” said Fran Stewart, a Canadian citizen who bought a single-family home in Hobe Sound last month. “We spent three years touring Mexico for property¥…¥but we decided on buying here. Real estate there is very complicated to buy.”

Fran and her husband, Greg Stewart, purchased the home through Janet McCullough, a Realtor with Prudential Florida Realty, which carries listings from the tri-county region.

“It was one of the best-kept secrets for so long, but the Treasure Coast has been discovered,” she said. (more…)

Sales of existing Treasure Coast homes spiked during the third quarter of 2008 but prices continued to slide.

There were 1,128 sales of existing single-family homes in the Fort Pierce-Port St. Lucie Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Stuart, a report released Tuesday by the Florida Association of Realtors showed. The figure was up 23 percent from the 916 sold during the same quarter last year.

The median sales price was $150,600, down 31 percent from $218,300 in the same period last year. (more…)