Jun 6

Jun 6 Goodbye Saddlebrook Road

After over 15 years of ownership we recently decided to sell our condo at Saddlebrook in Florida. It’s been a long time coming and getting to this final decision was hard, but also easy at the same time. So, how about let’s start at the very beginning.

We visited the resort/community around 15-16 years ago as we were invited by friends to stay at their house located on the grounds of Saddlebrook. The place (Saddlebrook) has quite a long history. It’s a combination resort along with acres of private homes of various sizes. The resort was operated by Tom Dempsey and family and was a mixture of condo’s situated throughout the main resort grounds. The condo’s were primarily privately owned but shared with the resort. That is where it often gets quite confusing. When asked, I would answer - it’s not a time share and it’s not a fractional ownership. The arrangement is that you share the time with the resort. So, that simply means you can’t live there. You could choose 3 weeks in the spring/summer and 3 weeks in the fall/winter and they would be blocked off for you. The resort has a very large convention centre complex so it’s main business was to attract business conventions to use it’s facility.

We did a tour of the units for sale and after spending a few hours with the agent we decided to buy #802 which was a 2nd floor unit located just across the bridge to what is called the walking village. The unit was a 1 +1 with a balcony and a large living/dining area. The couch was a pull out and the bedroom had two Queen sized beds. The units were finished in a Tommy Bahama type of furnishing but you could tell that they would eventually need to be re-done. They were selling for around $95 to $125K (USD) so it wasn’t enough to drive myself crazy and at that time, the exchange rate was pretty good. So, we made the plunge and away we went. The resort has 45 tennis courts, two 18 hole golf courses, fitness centre, multiple pools and two restaurants along with a snack bar by the main pool. Over the next 15 odd years we would spend 4-5 weeks a year at Saddlebrook. We would always try to get there for Christmas, March Break and at some point during the summer. You would get to know the staff and we made a number of good friends during our years there.

We loved the energy of the place. As soon as we landed at the Tampa airport we always felt like we were home. Getting to Saddlebrook was always quite easy and we would take advantage of everything Tampa has to offer. From spring break baseball, movies, theatre, the beach, restaurants and of course the shopping. Sarah brought a number of friends to Saddlebrook, so for her this was a fun place to visit.

So, why sell? As I mentioned earlier the rooms were looking a bit tired so we knew that at one point we would have to ante up for the renovation. They renovated a few models for everyone to look at and gave us a ball park figure of about $15K for a minor refresh. Things like new carpets, paint and a general clean up was what was planned. Unfortunately, in the background the owner of the resort was trying to sell the place and stopped spending a lot of money on upkeep. I also didn’t mention that when we bought was the beginning of the economic downturn in the US and a lot of large companies stopped spending huge sums of money on sales meetings and large scale conventions. This has had a drastic impact to Saddlebrook, as the resort was not really marketed as a place for families. The beach was a good 45 minutes away. Because of the decline of business attendance, the amount of monies received in the room sharing became almost non-existant. When we first bought the financials indicated that the amount you would receive basically covered the cost of ownership. The cost of carrying was around $10K which was for things like taxes, condo fees, memberships and other misc costs. With the same in revenue, it became a bit of no-brainer. All we had to do was fly there and get a rental car.

Well, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Covid. The emergence of the pandemic made it almost impossible to get to Saddlebrook for the last few years. I think by not going we fell out of step with our norm - but of course so did the rest of the world. The chief accountant (Sheila) has been talking about selling for a few years, but I always pushed back. First of all the value of the units had been dropping for the last 10 years. On the surface this doesn’t make sense since the real estate market in Florida has gone crazy. I think the unique ownership model hurts the value of the properties - since you can’t live there people are not as willing to invest into this type of ownership. It may also be more challenging to finance this type of property.

The ownership was primarily made up of likely older people, who had owned for a number of years. Maybe they had stopped going but were frustrated with having to pay all the annual fees - basically losing a lot of money. Some units were selling for as low as $10K - which was simply crazy, but I fully understand why. It could be people who inherited the units from their parents and just wanted to get rid of them. In the background, we all knew that the owner of Saddlebrook had been trying to sell the resort for at least five years. All kinds of rumours had been floated including that a number of hotel chains might be buying Saddlebrook. I had remained optimistic because I assumed that whoever bought Saddlebrook would have to put money into the resort - fixing up the grounds, and creating a marketing plan to reach new consumers. If you went on travel websites and read resort reviews you would always see the same things - staff were great, but the rooms were extremely tired and needed updates. But this wasn’t going to happen under the current owner.

After a long period we finally learned that a sale was going to happen. A Miami based developer decided to buy the resort only a few months go. The question is what did that mean for us - the owners? Sheila went down for a week in March with her sister and reported back that it was clear that the resort had fallen into tough times. The Sports Bar and steak house had been closed so that left only one restaurant available. The fitness centre needed to be cleaned up and the heaters in the pool were not always working. She ended up talking to the managment and found out that the new owners had bought up all of the units that had been for sale. With a bit of exploring we were able to find out that we could sell our unit to the new owners - obviously at a loss but a lot better than what they had been selling for on the open market. In fact, when Sheila was sitting by the pool someone offered her $9K cash for our unit. Maybe they knew something we didn’t? The kicker was that we were told that the new owners planned to completely gut the units - at a cost much much higher than what we were originally told. The estimate was somewhere around $40K (USD). With the current outlay of $10K a year just to cover the carrying costs along with this new potential cost to renovate, it wasn’t that difficult to reach the decision to sell.

Sheila handled all of the difficult things with the new owners to finalize the sale and we asked that we put into the agreement the ability to make one last trip to Saddlebrook. The plan was for me to drive down and clean out the closet and throw out the things we didn’t want and bring back everything that we wanted to keep. I left Toronto on a Wednesday afternoon and after two days on the road arrived on Friday afternoon. It was a bittersweet trip. I knew that this was likely my last time ever going to Saddlebrook. But after spending a few days there it was apparent to me that we had made the right decision to sell. The resort was basically empty. And it was easy to see that it was going to take a lot of money and more than a few years to bring Saddlebrook back to what we remembered. I am fully confident that they will bring it back but we don’t want to take that time. Sometimes you have to cut your losses. One of my reasons to not sell was knowing that I was now retired and maybe I could go down to Florida for some of the winter months. But after spending a week there on my own - I realized that hanging out without anyone isn’t really for me. So….selling was the right thing to do.

I managed to do a few last minute things like visiting my favorite Mexican diner and hitting up Target. However there is an old saying that sometimes you can’t go back - after being away for more than 2 years it was different and it wasn’t as good as I remembered it….so, time to move on. I will miss it but life goes on and time to make new memories.