Realtors, owners improve beachside neighborhoods a house at a time – Daytona Beach News

Even as her heart raced, Heather Morales conceded the 1926 beachside home was even less inviting on her first visit a couple of weeks earlier. Squatters had been living there, and the place was strewn with soiled clothes, rotting food and a rodent of an undetermined species.

At least it was dead.

Unlike almost anywhere else in Florida, selling real estate near the ocean in Daytona Beach can be a frightening experience. Just blocks from the World’s Most Famous Beach lie some of the city’s cheapest and most crime-ridden properties.

The News-Journal’s four-part series last summer, “Beauty and Blight,” documented how 30 years of redevelopment efforts have failed to clean up the areas near Daytona Beach’s main tourist destinations. A strategy of promoting big projects — often at great public expense — and hoping their benefits would trickle down into the surrounding neighborhoods instead left those areas in decline.

Nearly a year later, signs of improvement can be found.

In the last 12 months, 140 residential listings have sold on the beachside between Seabreeze Boulevard and Silver Beach Avenue, according to reports compiled by the Daytona Beach Area Association of Realtors. The median sales price was $65,000 — far below the $113,750 reported on countywide sales in March but a 12 percent increase over all sales made in the beachside area in the previous 12 months. The rate of increase for beachside houses exceeds that for the overall market, which was up 7 percent.

Another sign of improvement — piles of ruined furniture and trash left for pickup along South Oleander Avenue after Morales and Jill Pennington listed the house, one of five on the street for the partners from Realty Pros Assured.

The circumstances of how they got the cheap rentals ready to show as potential single-family fixer-uppers — including an eviction notice to squatters and a hand from police — illustrate the depth of the problems in Daytona’s beachside neighborhoods.

Yet when things are so bad, even incremental progress looms large.

Neighbor Suzanne Ramsey was so excited to hear of the sale plans she helped landscape the house next to hers, covering the front yard with pine bark mulch and planting a few shrubs and flowers. It wasn’t an entirely selfless act, she noted.

“I can’t tell you how relieved and happy we are,” said Ramsey, speaking of others in the neighborhood who, like her, bought and renovated historic homes with an eye to reclaiming the neighborhood. “Those houses have been a real torment.”

After completing the landscaping job, Ramsey for the first time opened the south-facing plantation shutters that blocked the view of the neighbors.

“I had tried to put it from my mind,” said Ramsey, an interior designer and member of the city’s Main Street-South Atlantic Redevelopment Board. “I tried to pretend it wasn’t there.”

GOOD INTENTIONS

Since she bought and started restoring her two-bedroom, 1920s-era home in 2010, Ramsey’s house has stood as a showpiece in the Surfside Village neighborhood that’s cited by real estate agents as an example of what can be done with the beachside cottage homes.

Ken Paz had similar ambitions for five Oleander Avenue houses when he started buying them about a decade ago, said his son, Thomas Paz of Atlanta. The elder Paz was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries following an auto accident 11 months ago. Once he was unable to actively manage his properties, squatters moved into some of the houses, his son and neighbors said.

Even before the accident, Paz was frustrated in his hopes to help revitalize the neighborhood as he had done in Atlanta before his “semi-retirement” to Florida, his son said. Paz would come to call himself a slumlord, telling members of the redevelopment board he could lease his properties only to the lowest-class of renters until the city did more to clean up the area.

Cash-only deals with renters who couldn’t pass a criminal background check made Paz part of the problem in the view of some neighborhood reformers, but the owner always had bigger hopes for the properties, his son said.

“That was his frustration,” said Thomas Paz, who helped his father make renovations on some of the houses. “He wanted to encourage young professionals to move into the area, people who would have that pride of ownership and be active in the community.”

Paz, who’s 61, lived in one of the houses and raved of the lifestyle on the beachside, where sea breezes make for comfortable walks to the beach, Peabody Auditorium or the restaurants and movie theater at the Ocean Walk Shoppes.

“He would walk every Saturday morning and go to the movies,” Thomas Paz said.

Signs of Paz’s ambitions can be seen in the house at 38 S. Oleander Ave. Paz and his son built an elaborate wood deck in the backyard. The wood floors on the staircase landing have been sanded and polished so they gleam in comparison with the rest of the floor. The tile floors in the kitchen are laid in an elaborate medallion design.

“He probably spent a couple of days laying that,” Thomas Paz said. “That tells you what he thought of these houses, what he wanted for this neighborhood.

“You’re four blocks from water in either direction. There’s no way this should be a low-rent district.”

MASSIVE CLEANUP

After Thomas Paz took over his father’s affairs, he decided selling the houses would be the best way to fulfill his father’s legacy. The timing seemed right; in the last year, area residents have seen more resident-owners move in with an eye to restoring the neighborhood, Ramsey said.

“It seems we get more and more all the time,” she said.

A strengthening real estate market certainly helps, but Ramsey and the real estate agents are quick to point to city actions for contributing to a sense of rebirth.

For example, a rental inspection ordinance adopted last year in the wake of The News-Journal series puts in place standards that make it less feasible for a new purchaser to market the properties to low-price tenants.

“It might make you think twice about that approach,” city redevelopment director Reed Berger said. “It allows us to get a better understanding of what’s going on in some of these places before they can deteriorate to the point where we can lose these historic homes. Not everyone likes (the ordinance), but the goal is to help everyone in the neighborhood.”

Another example is city policy on spending redevelopment money. Rental properties no longer qualify for renovation grants, the city’s way to encourage the houses to revert to single-family or vacation homes, Berger said.

Of course, it will be the new owners who decide how to use the Oleander houses, three of which were built in the 1920s, the most recent in 1960. They carry list prices between $100,000 and $125,000 and are in various states of disrepair.

They look better than they did, just for being vacant — which wasn’t easy. Florida’s eviction laws can be time-consuming, even where squatters are involved. Morales and Pennington served notice on the people in the houses, unsure of how many weeks — or months — it would take.

It only took days after one of the squatters got annoyed and called police, wanting to get a trespass warning against the agents. After police arrived, they learned the woman had a warrant for her arrest.

“After the police took her away in handcuffs, the rest of (the squatters) were gone in less than 24 hours,” Ramsey said. “I don’t think they wanted any more (background checks).”

A massive cleanup operation followed, though indications of the transient lifestyle remain. Scrawled in permanent black marker across the front of a refrigerator in one house is a message: “Do not consume without permission. Everyone must fend for themselves. Rent doesn’t include food!!!!”

In one house, where squatters kept stacks of glass cages filled with reptiles, a blue-painted board covers the chimney firebox. “I don’t think we’ve been brave enough to open that up yet,” joked Morales, simply glad the squatters took the reptiles with them. “We’re not sure what we’ll find.”

Ramsey believes her house was in better shape when she bought it than the new listings, but she hopes her new neighbors see the same value in living in a historic home in a once-proud neighborhood.

Removing all the trash and ruined furniture revealed heart of pine hardwood floors that had always been there, but there was something new, too, that became clear to the real estate agents, Pennington said, only after the place was cleaned out.

“We see potential.”