Troubled town-home community remakes itself amid housing slump
                        

Article Courtesy of The Orlando Sentinel

By Mary Shanklin

Published January 5, 2012

   

About a five-minute walk from the Ritz-Carlton hotel in south Orange County is a town-home community that has seen its share of hard times.

Not that long ago, Whisper Lakes was collecting only about two-thirds of the association dues its owners were supposed to pay to keep the place running. Town homes that had sold for $175,000 at the peak of the homebuying frenzy five and six years ago were going for $40,000. Shrubbery was dying, and owners complained that the buildings' quarter-century-old, hunter-green paint scheme resembled that of military barracks. 

 

"I bought because of the location," said Shelli Costa, president of the Whisper Lakes homeowners association, who took a leading role in reclaiming the community the past two years. "But I never thought it looked good. I felt like I lived at Fort Bragg."

To make matters worse, more than $10,000 went missing from the community association's accounts. The economic-crimes units for two law-enforcement agencies are now investigating a former Whisper Lakes employee, according to police records. 

Such travails are common in a housing market

Shelli Costa, Barbara Wiseman and Emory Sumlin stand in front of their Whisper Lakes homes with their new paint schemes.


that has been particularly challenging for town homes and condominiums. With higher proportions of investor-owners, such properties have been the hardest hit by foreclosures since the 2007-09 recession. 

In the second week of December, for instance, 62 percent of condo, town-home and villa sales in the core Orlando market involved distress properties, compared with just half of the single-family-home sales, according to the Orlando Regional Realtor Association. 

Located near SeaWorld and Florida Mall, Whisper Lakes has more resident-owners than many complexes, and only 40 percent of its sales in the past three years have been foreclosures. And yet, even with the advantage of having so many owners living there, the 153-unit town-home neighborhood was neglected, board members said. 

A few board members banded together about two years ago with visions of reclamation. They started by changing the property-management company and have since changed companies several times. Rather than hiring landscapers and maintenance crews hand-selected by the management company, the board took bids and paid less for those services than the community had previously paid. 

"The management company was in control," said longtime town-home owner Emory Sumlin, treasurer of the community association. "The administrative costs I found to be sort of absurd. … If you have no one who questions the finances in their own community, you become a community that will begin to deteriorate." 

At least one board member spent Saturdays knocking on doors to find out why some owners were late paying their association fees. And rather than continue paying lawyers $300 an hour to collect outstanding fees, the association hired debt collectors for a fraction of that cost. Total delinquencies have dropped from $65,000 to $27,000.

With the savings from changing contractors and the additional fee revenue, board members turned their attention to the property's dated condition. They replaced dead shrubbery with new plantings. New chaise longues took the place of 17-year-old furniture on the deck of the association pool. 

Kids had set things on fire and thrown them in the pool before.

"That doesn't happen anymore," Costa said. "When it looks like crap, people treat it like crap."

Perhaps that most grating thing — the green-and-beige paint — was more difficult to change. Costa said the board had to push the Whisper Lakes master community association for permission to update the 1980s color palette, and volunteers went door-to-door collecting owners' signatures needed to change the look. 

When it was time to hire a painting company, one company bid $240,000 and another $80,000. Sumlin said the low bidder got the job, but it took longer than it would have with the other company, from April through October. But the association didn't have to charge owners a special assessment to cover the tab.

Owners have responded to the improvements by making some of their own. Some have replaced rotted woodwork or enclosed their back porches, Sumlin said. 

The enclave of town homes in Whisper Lakes has had so few resales in the past year that it's difficult to gauge how much the improvements are paying off. But Williamsburg Realty agent Dan Murphy said the upgrades have made a difference. Though prices were once in the $40,000s, some units have sold in the upper $50,000s, and others are attracting offers in the $70,000s.

"The place shows so much better now," Murphy said. "It looks like a community that's cared for, versus before, when it looked so dated." 

 

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