Introducing Florida’s Best Realtors

 

A long-time friend of mine recently took a brief vacation to Florida’s west coast in hopes of potentially securing a home for his planned retirement to the Sunshine State.

After five days he returned home, a frustrated mess, citing a paltry inventory of homes and townhouses coupled with buyers who won Hatfield-McCoy-like bidding wars by offering up to 20 percent over the asking price in cash.

One afternoon, he said one of the real estate agents allowed him a walk-through of a home she recently sold just to get an idea of what may be available. She revealed that she had exactly three homes currently on the market with, I kid you not, 70 hopeful homeowners vying for them. Let me repeat that for emphasis – SEVENTY.

He joked that at least he was able to play some competitive pickleball and sample some of the area’s finer restaurants.

At last report, some 1,000 people a day were moving to Florida.

Here in New York, not only have thousands of residents relocated to their southern-most neighbor, but the exodus from the Empire State has been so fast and so furious that it has already lost one congressional seat and is in danger of losing another.

There are myriad reasons for this. For one, the pandemic has shown that working remotely could be, and is, effective, despite the Luddites who still mandate in-office attendance. So why scrape ice off your windshield and shovel out in a Wisconsin or North Dakota mid-winter blast when you can don shorts and polo shirts amidst brilliant sunshine and 75-degree temperatures?

Yet the two people most responsible for citizens elbowing their way out of New York are in order, the mayor of New York City - one William DeBlasio, and the governor Andrew Cuomo – each of whom have done everything in their collective power to ensure a lifetime achievement award from the Florida Chamber of Commerce in addition to setting new benchmarks for tone-deaf incompetence.

With a crime rate not seen since the early 1970s, New York City celebrated Mother’s Day weekend with three tourists being shot in Times Square – including a four-year old and another stabbed on the subway just two hours later. Meanwhile skyrocketing taxes and a business climate that was ranked 49^th out of 50 states has already prompted billionaire financier Carl Icahn and hedge find operator Paul Singer to relocate to – yep, Florida, along with private equity firm Blackstone. Others that have recently established a large footprint in Florida include Alliance Bernstein, Morgan Stanley, UBS and lest we not forget Goldman Sachs.

And more are certain to follow them down I-95.

Between these two inept bureaucrats they managed to whiff on a three-inch putt and foul up a deal that would have brought an Amazon headquarters to New York, along with 25,000 jobs and despite his plea for businesses to remain in New York, Cuomo cannot drop his obsession with the SALT cap.

In 2017 when Donald Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000, Cuomo, when he was not being accused of harassment from two-dozen former staffers or his genocidal order to send COVID patients into nursing homes, has harbored an obsession looking to restore it to its former levels. To wit, the state’s high earners will feel the full impact of what are already obscenely high taxes and all but invite them to leave for warmer and tax-friendlier climates.

Even President Biden isn’t looking to overturn the SALT cap. But as is his custom it is always someone or something else that is the problem – he claims that the state’s high tax problem is “property taxes.” Not surprisingly, he forgot that state mandates on local government are what result in high property taxes.

There is an irrefutable axiom that warns when you’re digging yourself in a hole, put down the shovel. These two not only cannot stop digging New York in a hole, they have figurately, if not literally, repeatedly gone to Home Depot for replacement shovels.