Toby Tobin, the Florida real estate blogger who has followed the Bobby Ginn saga closely, is on a roll. We reported a few days ago about Toby’s piece on how the Ginn organization has failed to pay its fair share for certain amenities at the Reunion Resort while property owners get hit with ever increasing assessments (see article immediately below).
Toby is now reporting at GoToby.com that 170 single-family homeowners in the Ocean Hammock community in Palm Coast, FL, are petitioning to amend Ginn “master documents” that permit their fellow homeowners to rent their houses on a nightly basis. The lack of a prohibition in the original documents, some believe, was an effort by Ginn to clear the way for nightly rentals at the nearby Hammock Beach Resort. Whether that was the case or it was simply an oversight, the consequence is that what owners expected would be a quiet, upscale neighborhood at Ocean Hammock may soon mimic the golf resort at Disney World, with transient vacationers who are not invested -– literally or figuratively -– in the community.
“This (the nightly rentals) has the clear potential of converting our wonderful residential community into a transient resort community,” the petition states. The homeowners seek a language change that would make one month the minimum term for all rentals.
The dust-up at Ocean Hammock provides yet another object lesson for those seeking a golf community home. Target only those communities whose developers have established records of success and little if any debt. Bobby Ginn, who left the Hilton Head area in the late 1980s under a cloud and later borrowed more than $600 million from Credit Suisse for his now defunct empire, should not have passed either of those tests.
