It had to happen. Builders have been offering more and more incentives for the sale of their homes, especially inventory homes. The larger builders have been land banking sites for future development, and securing options on parcels from 400 acres to 2,000 acres. Undeveloped acreage for residential use was selling for over $50,000 per acre, and in some cases, when applied to the useable portion of the land, close to $100,000 per acre.
Many of the builders are now dropping their options, and some are selling land they already purchased. Owners are calling developers they turned away a year or two ago, and going down their list of backups.
St. Joe Company is the largest private landowner in the state of Florida. They transferred their focus from being a paper company to being a real estate development company. They bought, then sold a real estate company (Prudential Florida Realty, which they renamed Arvida). They got into home construction, and now they are getting out of that. St Joe has been a huge development force in the Florida Panhandle, where they have most of their land.
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