In This Issue
- Flood Factors: An Early Hurricane Season
- Some Decisions of Florida HOAs May Be DOA
- The Millennials Are Coming, The Millennials Are Coming
Flood Factors: An Early Hurricane Season
I was matched up for nine holes on a weekday recently in Hartford, CT, with a young man, a 30-something. As a nosy retiree, I tend to ask working age people “what do you do when you are not playing golf.” (I know, annoying, right?) He responded that he worked for a major Hartford insurance company in the risk management division and specialized in assessing potential climate disasters. I asked him if he was familiar with a web site called RiskFactor.com which I have written about and used to assess, among other things, the risk of major flooding in southeastern golf communities over the coming decades.
“We use risk factor in our calculations,” he told me.
Some six years ago, I wrote an article about the risk of flooding in selected golf communities and used a few examples of communities where the risks were high for flooding in the coming 30 years. A friend who lived in one of the high-risk communities took me to task for spewing “bad data.” On this day last week on the golf course, I felt vindicated. One of the largest property and casualty companies in the world is using the same resource I did…
…which brings me to the upcoming hurricane season. As I write this, Hurricane Beryl has stormed through the Caribbean setting records – the earliest major storm in any season, highest winds ever in June – provoking climatologists to indicate, “We warned you this would be a bad year for hurricanes. Now you see what we meant.”
Assuming they are correct, this could be a summer of devastation for coastal golf communities – not only via physical damage but it could be a marketing nightmare. Imagine the possibility of national news reports on flooding along the east and Gulf coasts, with all the customary photographs of floating homes and toppled boats in people’s backyards. (Recall how shocked we were by the pictures and stories coming out of Fort Myers, FL, just two years ago this October.)
The Gulf states of Florida, Texas and Louisiana, in that order, have the highest probabilities of hurricane strikes. Ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, are North Carolina and South Carolina. Coastal Georgia, ranked seventh, is somewhat protected by geography, with a coastline that swerves inland; most of Georgia’s coast is a good 75 miles from the Gulfstream which tends to whisk Atlantic hurricanes northward toward the Carolinas. Nevertheless, storm surges can affect the city of Savannah and the nearby islands of Hilton Head and Daufuskie, both popular spots for golfing residents. In short, no area along the eastern seaboard is immune from hurricane risk. (Thinking of you, my native New Jersey.)
I don’t have space here to cite all the specifics of RiskFactor.com’s model to calculate flooding potential, but here is what they say, in part, at their website:
“The First Street Flood Model (FSF-FM) is a nationwide model that allows us to determine the potential flood risk from rain, streamflow, sea level rise, tide, and storm surge for any location. The FSF-FM is a complex system comprised of various water models and qualified input components. It is built on decades of peer-reviewed research and can forecast how flood risks will change over time due to environmental changes.”
Flood risk can change significantly in just a few years. When I first looked up five years ago the flood potential for the condo my wife and I own in Pawleys Island, SC, the rating was a modest 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. The risk of significant flooding in our condo, which abuts a large pond and is a few hundred yards from the marsh that separates our community from the Atlantic Ocean, was noted as “moderate.” When I looked just last week at the current rating, it was 6 of 10, raising the risk to “major.” Anyone want to buy a condo?
Just as significantly, the risk in one part of a community can be dramatically different than the risk in another part. For example, the nicest, most expensive single-family homes in our community are located directly on the marsh, looking east toward the three rows of homes on the island and the Atlantic Ocean beyond, all about a half mile away. One house on the marsh sold for over $1 million last year. One of its neighbors directly on the marsh has a flood factor rating of 9 out of 10, or “extreme,” up from the category of “major” just five years ago. (RiskFactor.com has stopped indicating the specific probabilities unless you purchase a subscription, but suffice that the chance of major flooding at some point in the next three decades is high. It could be this year or it could be in 30 years, or any year in between.)
My purpose in this newsletter and at my website, GolfCommunityReviews.com, is to share information that will help those searching for a golf community to make the most informed decisions. (And those already living in a golf community to assess their own situations.) I am not a climate denier. Seas are getting warmer and rising, events that can be and are measured continuously by climate scientists. When plunking down hundreds of thousands of dollars for a home, folks should always assess the risks. RiskFactor.com is one of many tools available.
My wife and I are planning to host a family reunion in the summer of 2025 on the beach in Pawleys Island. Fingers crossed that we will be lucky with our timing, but I will have a backup plan to move things inland should our luck run cold. (Thank goodness for the Weather Channel.) As for our condo, Pawleys Island is a wonderful place to visit, but on the cusp of future hurricane seasons that may turn especially nasty, I am not sure I still want to live there.
Some Decisions of Florida HOAs May Be DOA
The state of Florida has put the brakes on many of the trivial decisions some Homeowner Associations (HOAs) make. Effective July 1, no longer will HOAs be able to discipline their members for such trespasses as owning the wrong breed of dog, driving a particular car or keeping their holiday lights on display for more than a few weeks after the holiday.
HOA board members responsible for such capricious actions against the people they are supposed to represent can now be held legally liable. The new law aims to enhance the quality of potential board members by making training mandatory. (No word yet on whether identifying dog breeds will be part of the curriculum.) That extra requirement could put a damper on all budding micromanagers waiting to inflict their personal preferences and tastes on their constituents. Conversely, though, it might inspire a more serious and responsible group of leaders to sign up for HOA participation. Time will tell.
For many residents of golf communities across the land, HOAs are a necessary evil. The necessary part is that some group must be charged with keeping members of the association from flouting the rules and turning the community into a dog’s breakfast of home styles and helter-skelter landscaping. More importantly, a group of responsible homeowners must be tasked with keeping the community solvent by paying its bills and controlling its expenses.
HOAs run the gamut from well-run to incompetence to corruption. Back in Florida, for example, in a community called The Hammocks, six members of the community’s HOA were arrested after $2 million went missing from The Hammocks’ coffers. Presumably to cover their tracks, these brilliant thieves raised HOA fees by 400%. For details on Florida’s new law, and with apologies to anyone named Karen, see Curbing the Karens: Florida reins in over-mighty homeowners’ groups.
Some HOAs can run effectively for years before one controversy exposes underlying issues of questionable governance. My wife Connie and I found this out in South Carolina where we own one of 28 units in a condo community tucked into a 900-acre golf community that features condos and single-family homes. Over the 25 years we have owned there, we spent only an average of 10 to 12 weeks annually in residence. Because of that, we never took annual board elections too seriously.
Big mistake.
Our building of six units and the original condo building of just two units preceded four other buildings designed to look like ours from the front. Their reverse sides face the golf course, and all those newer units were built with second-floor porch decks off the upstairs bedrooms. A few years ago, because of questionable construction methods and maintenance issues, rot was discovered in some of the upstairs porches. Our HOA board decided to replace all of them and assess EVERYONE in the association $14,000 each for the replacements, even though eight units, less than a third of the total, do not have the porch decks.
Unfortunately for us, the porch decks were defined in the community’s documents as “limited common elements,” making the entire association strictly liable for repair or replacements. A more judicious, creative and fair HOA board might have shared the costs more evenly – and without the obvious self-interest of their decision. You see, every member of the board at the time lived in a unit with a porch deck, and an inspector’s report implied that the rot could have been prevented by early detection of pooling water on the owners’ decks. If our HOA, which should represent the interests of ALL its members, had excluded from the assessment those of us who did not benefit from a new porch deck, the board members and their immediate neighbors would have been assessed $16,000, instead of $14,000 for their brand new decks.
Those of us who helped pay for the repairs on decks we will never use, learned our lesson; in the last two board elections, my wife, our immediate neighbors and I worked to get two people who live in our building elected to the board. As in national and local politics, you get the HOA board you deserve. Or, as former President Obama liked to say, “Don’t boo! Vote!”
The Millennials Are Coming, The Millennials Are Coming
Never underestimate the ability of the media to take one isolated anecdote and use it to create a battle between generations. You see it in political reporting every day now, as media reports exacerbate the divisions within the country. But when dividing to try to conquer Internet clicks starts to infect golf community reporting it is a special kind of annoying.
The website Moneywise, which one traffic monitor indicates received almost 11.5 million visits in the last three months, is the latest to engage in fact-absent reporting, this time about millennial home buyers moving to golf communities and upsetting the baby boomers already there. I have my ear close to the ground when it comes to golf communities and I can say, with confidence, this is a bunch of hooey.
As evidence, Moneywise cites an NBC interview with one newly married 30-something couple in Tequesta, FL, who say they are looking for a quiet place to live; apparently they can afford it. Good for them. But after indicating the couple has “not heard a peep” from any of their future neighbors, the author of the article can’t resist stirring the pot with, “But that doesn’t mean they haven’t caught their attention.” He offers no evidence that they have caught anyone’s attention. Totally made up.
The sloppy reporting goes farther. Citing a Wall Street Journal article titled “Millennials are coming for your golf communities” that features another couple relocating to the Tequesta Country Club, there is no evidence of bias against the millennial couple – just mention of the fact that the home they bought and the other couple’s home were priced in the mid $600s. A headline in search of a story.
But we finally get around to the one anecdote by the one angry homeowner couple in Coachella Valley, CA, who allegedly stand in for baby boomers everywhere. After indicating how little patience they have for Halloween trick-or-treaters, resident Doug Baker adds, as his wife Jamie stands by, “We don’t want Coachella here all year long.” (Note: Coachella is the annual music festival held nearby.).
Warning to all millennials contemplating a move to Coachella Valley: Don’t take your kids on Halloween to Doug and Jamie’s house.
Here’s an open invitation to all millennials looking for a home in a golf community.
Thanks for reading,
Larry Gavrich
Founder & Editor
Home On The Course, LLC
