FLORIDA KEYS REAL ESTATE
KW LAND SOLID DEAL JIM SMITH
TALK SHOW HOST n
A N I N T E R V I E W W I T H Bob Cardenas
Jim Smith/JS: I’m with Realty Ex- ecutives here town, broker associ- ate. My guest this afternoon is Bob Cardenas, who’s a big guy in real estate down here. He is president of Key West Association of the Re- altors in the Lower Keys. BC: Real estate has been my career all my life. I’ve been doing this for about 33 years. I got into it be- cause of my passion for sailing. I decided to get into real estate, make a lot of money, then sail around for the rest of my life. Well, it turned into a wonderful career. I’ve been down here in Key West going on nine years. My family has been down here for about 37 years. My wife has got roots that go all the way back to Green Turtle Key in the Bahamas. Tey were some of the first settlers here in Key West. I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs, but there is a lot of good news.
JS: Everyone has heard that real es- tate runs in cycles. So you have seen things like this before? BC: I have. I was selling real estate back in the early ’80s when interest rates went up to 19.5 percent for houses. Can you imagine trying to get someone qualified to buy any kind of house at that kind of inter- est rate? Tings slowed down. Ten there was a Savings and Loan crisis, where Savings and Loans did ex- actly what the banks did this time. Tey started making loans that didn’t make a lot of sense. Tey
started getting very, very loose with their money. and it created a crisis. Everything fell apart. Te govern- ment stepped in just like they’re doing now today and bailed people out. Everybody swore it would never happen again. Slowly but surely it got very, very restrictive, then it got easier and easier, until- money was flowing freely again. Probably a bit too freely, which seemed to cause this last crisis.
JS: Let’s talk about local trends and maybe even some national trends. What’s the market like out there? BC:Te market is actually improv- ing quite a bit, a lot more then people realize since November 2010 compared to November 2009. Te median price went up 54.4 percent which is huge. And the average sales price went up 24.9 percent. What that means is we’re heading for a pretty good sea- son this year. Te fact that the me- dian price went up so much tells me a lot of the lower-priced houses, the foreclosures and the short sales are all being taken off the market. Tat is what has to happen before we normalize. Year-to-date figures are still up. Median price is up and the number of sales is up 9.2 per- cent as compared to last year. All the indicators are that in Key West things are improving. Tat seems to be pretty consistent. In the lower keys, the number of listings Continued
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