Regis Philbin
Jun 6th, 2007, 11:56 PM
Don't these fools know their property will be underwater in the future? Al Gore said so...
http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/05/magazines/fortune/birger_pluggedin_beach.fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes
Forget global warming: Beach property is hot
You'd think that the prospect of flooded coasts would mean that beachfront real estate prices would be sinking. But you'd be wrong. Fortune's Jon Birger dives into the topic.
By Jon Birger, Fortune senior writer
June 5 2007: 4:10 PM EDT
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- It took me a while, but I finally got around to seeing Al Gore's global warming movie, "An Inconvenient Truth". (Clearly I don't get out enough. The last first-run movie I saw was "Happy Feet" with my kids.)
Truth be told, I was bored silly by much of the movie - I'm not a documentary person, I guess - but there was one part of the movie that really stuck with me. It was Gore's assertion that, by 2100, huge swaths of coastal America would be washed away by a 20-foot rise in sea level. As someone who writes about real estate off and on, I thought it begged an interesting question: With so much attention now being paid to global warming, why isn't the market for beach homes...well...under water?
The stock price of Florida beach-community developer St. Joe Company is actually up 9% since "An Inconvenient Truth" opened in May of last year. And real estate agents who specialize in selling seven-figure homes on the ocean say demand remains hot, despite the brutal market for real estate generally.
"It really hasn't been an issue," says Cape Cod, Mass. real estate agent Paul Grover. Grover has had a few warming-wary buyers who only wanted to look at homes on a bluff as opposed to right down on the beach, but such sentiments are rare. "The high end has been stable," he says. "In fact, I just sold a house [on the beach in Osterville, Mass.] for $9 million that probably would have sold for $7 million five years ago."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/05/magazines/fortune/birger_pluggedin_beach.fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes
Forget global warming: Beach property is hot
You'd think that the prospect of flooded coasts would mean that beachfront real estate prices would be sinking. But you'd be wrong. Fortune's Jon Birger dives into the topic.
By Jon Birger, Fortune senior writer
June 5 2007: 4:10 PM EDT
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- It took me a while, but I finally got around to seeing Al Gore's global warming movie, "An Inconvenient Truth". (Clearly I don't get out enough. The last first-run movie I saw was "Happy Feet" with my kids.)
Truth be told, I was bored silly by much of the movie - I'm not a documentary person, I guess - but there was one part of the movie that really stuck with me. It was Gore's assertion that, by 2100, huge swaths of coastal America would be washed away by a 20-foot rise in sea level. As someone who writes about real estate off and on, I thought it begged an interesting question: With so much attention now being paid to global warming, why isn't the market for beach homes...well...under water?
The stock price of Florida beach-community developer St. Joe Company is actually up 9% since "An Inconvenient Truth" opened in May of last year. And real estate agents who specialize in selling seven-figure homes on the ocean say demand remains hot, despite the brutal market for real estate generally.
"It really hasn't been an issue," says Cape Cod, Mass. real estate agent Paul Grover. Grover has had a few warming-wary buyers who only wanted to look at homes on a bluff as opposed to right down on the beach, but such sentiments are rare. "The high end has been stable," he says. "In fact, I just sold a house [on the beach in Osterville, Mass.] for $9 million that probably would have sold for $7 million five years ago."