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Neighborhood report

Area to spiff up for sales suitors

A real estate agent is encouraging families in Rural Branchton to dress up tracts for large-scale transactions.

By EMILY NIPPS
Published November 4, 2005

BRANCHTON - The location is right. The market is strong. The value is there.

What rural Branchton could really use is a little help in the looks department, said Weichert Realtors associate Tammy Hines, who is aggressively trying to sell large assemblages of Branchton acreage, on the edge of New Tampa, to developers.

Hines recently held a meeting in the home of one of the property owners, John Morales, whose family owns several acres along Apache Drive. About 22 curious Branchton residents, some retired and others toting small children, gathered in Morales' living room to listen to Hines pitch a good old-fashioned community cleanup.

"There's just something to be said about curb appeal," Hines told the group. "I have made some phenomenal connections (with developers), and I want to invite everyone in. I want them to experience and feel what's out here."

When the community cleanup is finished, Hines hopes to hold a "Parade of Properties," sort of a spinoff of Parade of Homes, which is thrown annually by the Tampa Bay Builders Association.

Hines wants potential buyers to see the horses and cows roaming among the neat manufactured homes. She wants them to meet the friendly landowners with their trimmed lawns and their long-established area roots.

Then she wants developers to make some attractive offers, buy up huge tracts and build to their hearts' content.

"It's not a matter of if," Hines said. "It's a matter of when."

A date for the community cleanup has not been decided, but Hines hopes it will take place in the next month or two.

Branchton, off Morris Bridge Road just east of Cory Lake Isles and south of the Cross Creek Boulevard intersection, is one of the last pieces of New Tampa to be tapped by large developers. Many of the Branchton landowners have lived in the area all of their lives, and they're in the enviable position of being able to agree on and negotiate the same price together as a group. Many are related to one another, either by blood or marriage, and most aren't in any hurry to leave.

"We would not want to sell individually," said Joan Morales, who is the stepmother of John and lives next door with John's father, Oscar. "We would want to sell as an assemblage because most of us are all related somehow."

The Branchton assemblage of 18.3 acres Hines put together is listed at $5.3-million, and the other assemblage of 15.8 acres is listed at $5.6-million. Several developers have shown interest in the properties, Hines said, but negotiations have not produced a buyer.

Recently, the area received attention from Hillsborough County officials, who want to buy 13.4 acres south of Branchton Park (not part of Hines' assemblages) to build a large athletic park. The two landowners and the county's real estate department agreed on a price of $235,000 per acre, but county commissioners decided not to buy the land until a second appraisal was conducted.

Some think it's a just matter of time before Branchton becomes a natural extension of New Tampa, complete with heavy traffic, retail shops and rows of suburban homes.

"It might take a year to a couple of years," John Morales said. "I'm patient. In the meantime, the property values out here are only going to go up."

- Emily Nipps can be reached at 813 269-5313 or nipps@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 3, 2005, 08:48:08]