SARASOTA, FLORIDA, December 29th, 2016 – Heightened market interest may be expected on attractively priced Sarasota homes for sale off Richardson Road east and west of Interstate 75. The long-proposed overpass in this area which would connect Cattlemen Road with the southern extension of Lakewood Ranch Blvd. is finally gaining ground.
This mid-December, the Sarasota planning commission unanimously approved an amendment to the county’s Comprehensive Plan which adds a four-lane overpass close to the southern edge of Nathan Benderson Park’s lake. The Sarasota County Commission will hold two hearings to review this amendment next year.
Planning commission officials are pushing approval of this overpass as a new east‒west connector that will ease traffic congestion on the University Parkway and Fruitville Road corridors. Significantly, the overpass will no longer extend west to Honore Avenue following protests from local residents wary of increased traffic in their area.
The developer of Lakewood Ranch, Schroeder-Manatee Ranch (SMR), is already working on the design of the project and its permitting phases. SMR expects that the planned overpass, estimated to cost $20 million, will be fully permitted by end-2017. East of the overpass project, SMR hopes to complete the extension of Lakewood Ranch Boulevard and Lorraine Road down to Fruitville Road by June 2017.
An even bigger infrastructure, the Diverging Diamond interchange (DDI) over University Parkway is proceeding ahead of schedule and may open to motorists as early as this spring. The Florida Department of Transportation is confident that the DDI, Florida’s first, will be fully finished in time for the World Rowing Championship to be held in September 2017 at the Nathan Benderson Park.
A small but nonetheless charming facility quietly opened in the northern end of this park. Inaugurated here in November is a new playground and event garden which is open to the public. Park officials plan to add this facility to its events programming in 2017.
South of the Nathan Benderson Park, the planned Interstate overpass may send ripple effects to Sarasota homes for sale in Deer Hollow, Whitaker Park and Forest Creek. At Deer Hollow, two homes priced in the low $200s were listed this December, featuring three bedrooms within floor plans in the 1,200‒1,400-square-foot-range.
Forest Creek too has a new listing in a three-bedroom home with a floor plan of 1,942 square feet and an asking price in the low $300s. New home construction designed with three to four bedrooms within floor areas of up to 3,000-plus square feet at the $300s and $400s price points are available at Whitaker Park.
Across Interstate 75 east of these communities, rare buying opportunities recently surfaced at Pine Valley Ranches and Fox Creek Acres. The current listing at Pine Valley has a price tag a shade under the $400s, essentially the land value as its residence is already a tear-down. The sales-listed Fox Creek Acres property has an asking price in the $700s with a four-bedroom home with a floor area of 2,814 square feet.
All residences in these two adjacent neighborhoods sit on large, four- to eight-acre lots suited for an equestrian lifestyle. These rare estate-sized home sites are conveniently close to the city, especially so with a new overpass soon rising in their vicinity.
SARASOTA, FLORIDA, October 7, 2019 – Property values of communities in the Sarasota-Manatee region now face lesser threat from neighborhood eyesores brought about by abandoned, foreclosed homes. Known in the real estate trade as zombie foreclosures, these properties have shrunk significantly in the region. According to an August report of ATTOM Data Solutions, abandoned […] more>>