Why aren’t oceanfront properties plummeting in price? Zillow’s White House crony, that’s why – by Peter Burrows 7/10/23 elburropete@gmail.com – http://www.silvercityburro.com 

For forty years we’ve been hearing dire warnings about how Global Warming (always capitalize a religion) is going to wreak havoc with humanity and cause exponential increases in droughts, floods, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, crop failures, snowstorms, UFO sightings, and climate refugees — who will number in the tens of millions. (OK, I made up that bit about UFOs.) 

A key part of the Global Warming apocalypse is that the melting poles are causing sea levels to rapidly rise. New York City, Washington, D.C., Florida and many other coastal areas around the world will soon disappear beneath the waves. That part about Florida caught my attention a few years ago. It was right after I had had a medical procedure that mostly old guys experience and it was an epiphany of sorts: Soon, I will be no more. 

Coming to grips with this existential fact, I realized that I wanted to spend my last days somewhere warm, both because where I live now is too damn cold and also to get a little acclimated to my probable hereafter. Why not, I thought, move to Florida, find a spot that still has a little beach left, then just lie down and float away, another casualty of Global Warming. Beats a hell of a lot of alternatives I can think of.  As an added bonus, I wouldn’t need to spend much on a place to live, maybe nothing at all. Must be lots of abandoned beach homes down there as people flee the ever-encroaching, unforgiving waves. 

With that in mind, I googled online realtor Zillow and looked for properties in my number one Florida-fantasy destination: Key Largo.  Bogie and Bacall, don’t cha’ know.  Well, was I in for a shock!  Those damn fools down there apparently hadn’t heard of Global Warming because not only were they not abandoning their homes. they were asking MORE for their properties than they had paid for them! A LOT more! 

A place I really liked, right on the ocean with a sea-wall, was listed for $5.6 million. The owner had paid $2.4 million back in 1996, fully eight years after NASA’s James Hansen famously warned Congress about Global Warming. 

Some people just don’t get it! 

I mentioned this to my favorite Liberal, and she said anybody buying those Florida properties would be damned sorry, or something to that effect.  I could tell by the look on her face that she had no sympathy for such fools. (I wrote about all this an article, “Global Warming, where is thy sting?” You can find it at http://www.silvercityburro.com, 4/18/15.) 

Well, here it is eight years later and Global Warming, now called Climate Change (genuflect), has become a terrifying reality, so much so that the head of the United Nations recently made a not too subtle call for a stop to the use of all fossil fuels — NOW — to save humanity:  

“António Guterres lashed out at the fossil fuels industry following a meeting with civil society groups, the Associated Press reported. The industry, he said, is “trading the future” for money. Guterres urged them to move “away from a product incompatible with human survival. The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions… It’s fossil fuels – period,” he said.” 

Al Gore, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize back in 2007 with the UN in the wake of his climate crisis documentary, “An inconvenient Truth,” has also been hyperventilating about the dangers we are now facing. At the Davos Forum last January, he cited the increase in greenhouse gases: 

” That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees.” 

Boiling the oceans!! OMG! You can be sure that caught my attention. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t moved to Florida back in 2015. I mean, I can think of better ways to go than being boiled. 

This is all very depressing, so in an effort to cheer myself up, I went back to Zillow to see just how big a drop in property values those beachfront-buying fools have suffered since 2015. A little schadenfreude. (I can be so petty.) Naturally, I started with Key Largo and — GASP!– doing your laundry in the boiling oceans down there in Key Largo is going to cost you mega bucks, a lot MORE than in 2015!  Here’s a couple of examples, but I urge you to do your own shopping. Very interesting! 

There was a two-story, maybe three story, at 48 S Andros Rd: 4 bd 4 ba, 3,024 sq ft for $3.5 million. Built in 1969, it sold in 2021, a mere two years ago, for $2 million.   

There is a much more modest place at 113 1st Ct,: 2 bd 2, ba, 800 sqft for $750,000. Built in 1964, it sold in 2019 for $334,000. (Zillow’s estimated value is $695k, which would mean in the last four years the value “only” doubled.)   

It was the same story wherever I looked in Florida: A modest little bit of new construction at 104 Ladoga Ave. In Tampa just listed for $12 million (6 bd, 8 ba 7,416 sq ft.) Zillow thinks it’s worth “only” $11,469,300. Mind you, this is a SPEC house. If that is a little high for you, there’s a nice condo at 5701 Mariner St in Tampa, unit 502, only $499,999 (2 bd 2 ba 1,424 sq ft) The complex was built in 1975, and this particular unit sold for $130,000 in 1998 and $189,000 in 2000.

If Miami is more to your liking, you will find the real estate market is just as insane. I saw an island property at 1384 S Venetian Way for only $12,900,000 and I think it was a man-made island. There’s just not enough beachfront property in the Miami area, so they have to make more, e.g., The Venetian Islands.  

Thinking maybe it’s just Florida that’s whacky, I looked to that model of sanity, California, only to find a new home on the beach at 24186 Case Cty. Malibu, with an asking price of $69,995,000 (5 bd/10 ba 10,527 sq ft.) This is another home built on speculation, and I have to think anybody putting this much money in a spec house must know the market pretty damn well. (Don’t you admire the seller’s clever price listing at just below $70 million.  Makes it look a lot cheaper. Right.)     

I looked elsewhere around the world for signs of waterfront sanity. No luck. I saw a sweet little number on the French Riviera for $27 million, nice view of the Med. In Tahiti, an “on the lagoon” property built in 1995 was asking $1.7 million. In Hawaii, there was a beach condo at 280 Hayoli St. (#B17,1 bd/1 ba 555 sq ft) asking only $375,000. Built in 1972 before Climate Change was a threat. It was sold in 2021 for $200,000. Maybe the buyer didn’t know about the rising oceans back then and is now trying to find another climate dummy to unload it on – for an 85 percent profit on a two-year investment.  Nice work if you can get it. 

Bottom line, I guess I’ll have to come to grips with the reality that I will not live long enough to enjoy the inevitable price collapse in Florida beach properties.  And, I know who is to blame: Barrack Hussein Obama. Some of you are thinking, “Are you off your meds again, Burro?” 

Not at all. I very clearly remember what Obama said in his victory speech in November of 2008, and I should have believed him. He said his election “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow.”  And, folks, Obama puts his money where his mouth is: In 2019, the Obamas paid $11.7 million for an ocean-level estate on Martha’s Vineyard; and when it gets chilly in Massachusetts, they fly out to their $8.7 million beachfront villa on Oahu, purchased in 2015. 

That’s over $20 million of his own money. On the beach. The media doesn’t report on that, do they? They also didn’t report what Obama said right after his slow the rising oceans comment, and I sure wish they would have. It would have saved me a lot of trouble:  

“Verily, Florida realtors will continue to prosper and old wannabe-beach-bum climate-deniers will wait in vain.” 

It’s only Cosmic Justice, folks. After all, I didn’t vote for him.