SRQ Magazine | In Conversation with Regional Trends in Real Estate and Home Building

REGIONAL TRENDS IN REAL ESTATE AND HOME BUILDING

In Conversation

CEO DAVID HUNIHAN ON LEE WETHERINGTON HOMES: Lee Wetherington Homes has been building throughout Sarasota and Manatee Counties for over 40 years since the 1970s. Headquartered in Sarasota, near Lakewood Ranch—we were one of the first builders to move our headquarters into Lakewood Ranch over 20 years ago. We are a high-end luxury custom home builder. We haven’t been that our entire history—that’s who we’ve become and where we are now. Our founder, Lee Wetherington, was originally a drywall contractor who grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and used to vacation here. In the early-mid ‘70s, he moved here and started a home-building business with a partner. He eventually decided to open his doors around 1981 as Lee Wetherington Homes. When I first started with the company in 1995, they were doing about 32 homes a year—by 2005, he had built over 400 homes. At that time, we were the largest local home builder in Sarasota and Manatee Counties. The landscape has changed a lot since then. The Great Recession hit and that caused the market to collapse. A lot of builders went out of business. Lee Wetherington Homes came through it in 2010-2012 by going back to its roots as a custom builder. We now do about 36 to 50 homes a year on average with an average price of about $2.5 million including a home and home site package. While Lee has turned over the day-to-day operations to the management team, he is still involved in the visioning and direction of the company and the design in many cases for models, I always want him involved in that. There are five shareholders of the company—Lee has the most shares and then there are four of us who also own shares. Part of why I think Lee brought me back (I was with him from 1995 to 2000 and came back about two years ago) is to work on the company’s legacy. We’re working on setting the company up with the proper standard operating procedures, infrastructure and personnel so that the vision will continue well into the future as something that I like to refer to as the Wetherington way. We’ll be able to continue to benefit our customers long after we’re gone.

BROKER AND PRESIDENT ROBERT MILLIGAN ON PREFERRED SHORE REAL ESTATE: Originally from Boynton Beach, I relocated to the Sarasota area in 1996 and have been a broker in Sarasota for 19 years. I’m passionate about the lifestyle that we get to enjoy here in Florida. I started Preferred Shore in 2014, and the idea was to become a fresh choice for customers who really appreciate the coastal lifestyle in all of the different market areas that we operate in. It’s my pleasure to share insight with customers to help shorten their learning curve for integrating in our community, gaining new social circles and learning how to participate in the different hobbies and activities that our coastal area offers. My associates have worked with me to close over 30,000 transactions that total over $8 billion in sales volume—so that vision has been working really well. We have created some different processes—one of which is to double down on doing a really nice job at digital media by housing that entire process in-house with staff. We’re uniquely positioned to get very creative with the marketing campaigns we offer customers. My associates have now earned nearly $250 million in commissions as a result of all of their hard work and the tools we’ve created to support them. There’s a great ripple effect in doing good work and helping people to accomplish their dreams through their career in real estate.

ROBERT MILLIGAN FOUNDER/PRESIDENT, PREFERRED SHORE REAL ESTATE

DAVID HUNIHAN CEO, LEE WETHERINGTON HOMES

JULY/AUGUST 2023 | INTERVIEW BY WES ROBERTS – EDITED BY BARBIE HEIT

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

David Hunihan is the CEO of Lee Wetherington Homes, the Sarasota-based custom home builder with an over 40-year local legacy of providing tailored customer experiences and creating exceptionally-cra ed luxury residences. Hunihan is firmly entrenched in Southwest Florida’s building industry – and has been for more than three decades. His extensive career includes a prior stint at Lee Wetherington Homes, working his way up from on-site sales associate to president.

Spanning 1995 to 2000, Hunihan played a pivotal role in growing Lee Wetherington Homes’ annual sales volume from $12 million to over $50 million. Hunihan has an intimate knowledge of the Suncoast’s housing market, having held operations and senior leadership positions with many of the region’s reputable builders, including Neal Communities, M/I Homes, Emerald Homes and Medallion Home. He is also the past president of the ManateeSarasota Building Industry Association and a Lifetime Spike of the National Association of Home Builders. A New Jersey native, Hunihan’s experience in marketing, sales, operations, construction and development has led him to oversee a multiaward-winning home builder.

Robert Milligan is founder and president of Preferred SHORE Real Estate, an independent full-service real estate brokerage specializing in both residential and commercial real estate, with corporate offices in Sarasota since 2014. Since becoming a broker/ owner in 2003, Robert has helped his associates earn more than $241 million in commission income on 30,000 transactions, totalling more than $8 billion in sales volume. Robert is credited for assembling a dynamic leadership team that has been a catalyst for the firm’s growth throughout the Suncoast region with additional offices in downtown St. Pete and Tampa. The firm aims to expand in affluent communities across Florida as a leading independent luxury brokerage.

WE’RE SEEING UNBELIEVABLE GROWTH IN FLORIDA. HOW IS OUR REGION CHANGING?

HUNIHAN: A builder I used to work for would state that Florida is a retirement destination where maybe 50 or 75% of the boomer population (the people that are going to retire) at least consider spending part of their remaining life in Florida, whether it’s as a second home or retiring here and being full-time. It’s always been this way, but it’s grown. And there are a couple of reasons why. The baby boomer generation was a cohort for about an 18-year span. We’re still in the middle of that, maybe towards the tail end of it, but we still have another few years of people that are retiring and will consider moving to Florida. We’re still a large vacation place with Disney World, our beaches, golf courses and all the things that people love to come to Florida to do. After the lockdowns, the lifestyle that people had here versus other parts of the country, the fact that if you’re going to have to be at home or be outside it’s just a better place to do that. All of those demographic trends and things have caused people to want to live here. That has been both a blessing and a curse: a blessing in that business has grown. The curse of course is how do you handle all that additional business when we have a supply chain that’s already strained, a labor pool that’s already strained and there’s only so much land you can develop. So we’re dealing with all those things right now.

MILLIGAN: What we’re seeing is quite dramatic, I think we knew that baby boomers were going to continue to retire to Florida, and then there might be a tapering of that energy. Instead, we got hit by an unexpected pandemic situation where we had an unbelievable surge of people, that in a lot of ways were demographically di erent than we expected. It’s been a very welcome and pleasant surprise for our industry. We can vicariously see that trend through the production of our agents. We have one agent who has been with me for about

three years now. Her name is Carissa Pelczynski, and in 2022, she closed $51 million alone. She’s actually closed in just three years, over $100 million dollars. She and her family just moved here from New York themselves just three years ago, so they were part of that migration. She’s built this incredible business now and has been enjoying that success. That’s one great example of the power behind this trend of people migrating to this area. Another great example is Michelle Ward, an agent who was with a couple other companies a short time before joining me seven years ago. She closed $82 million last year with her team. She’s focused on the luxury market which has exponentially been increasing in price and the number of transactions. Of that $82 million, many homes were waterfront, luxury homes. She has a beautiful $10 million home on Siesta Key on the market now and the people who are looking at this home are generally from the northeast. There aren’t that many people running around buying $10 million houses, but the people who are looking at it are not typically from Florida–that’s what we’ve been seeing. That property was actually featured on Fox Business’s Mansion Global a couple weeks ago. Lots of wonderful things are happening as a result of all of this energy and focus being on our beautiful state here.

HOW DOES OUR LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE HANDLE THIS GROWTH?

HUNIHAN: I’ve been in this business in Florida for over 30 years and I could literally, until about three years ago, count on one hand the amount of people from California, Washington or Oregon that we were selling homes to. The people from the Northeast and the Midwest would generally come here. But we have quite a few people that bought homes from us recently coming from Portland, Oregon and California. That really is surprising. And as for the people coming from Ohio, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, etc., even more of them are coming down here now. I grew up in New Jersey, worked in Manhattan and went to school in

Boston. So if you want to talk tra c, you want to talk crowded, we have not even come anywhere near what 13 lanes of tra c going each way, going over the George Washington bridge or the Garden State Parkway in the morning is compared to what it is here. The big thing for me is how we handle that as a community. That really goes back to good planning and smart growth. Lakewood Ranch has done a great job of that over the years. They started back in the ‘80s, planning for today. They had a map and a plan for infrastructure and arterial roads, north-south roads, communities, interior retail, industry, o ce space, knowing that they wanted a live/work/play community, a place where people could come and live and work and stay and recreate and not even have to go out, but also that would be able to accommodate growth.

MILLIGAN: The majority of our business is in Tampa, St. Pete and Sarasota and Charlotte Counties. We also operate in Fort Myers, Naples and Miami. So we are really statewide. As far as handling infrastructure, I’m no city planner, but there are pros and cons to everything. As a local, I’m very nostalgic about the way Sarasota was, but on the other side of the coin, there are a lot of great amenities and nicer restaurants and things to do now that we didn’t have then. Being a father of three boys, when I was growing up here, mostly everybody my age wanted to get out of here. And now that Sarasota’s become such a vibrant destination with more things to do, I’m hopeful that people, such as myself with children that are growing up here, may hope to remain here and stay closer to home and keep the family together.

WHAT CHANGES DO YOU SEE IN LIFESTYLES?

HUNIHAN: The retirees who have planned all their life have this idea of moving to Florida and being on the water or being on a golf course. I think that’s changing with the younger generation. What you’re seeing is more an overall lifestyle. They’re more interested in what they can walk to and where the good co ee shops are, where they can go

see a good concert and eat out. That’s where I see the master-planned communities being attractive. Lakewood Ranch, as an example, opened their newest section of downtown called Waterside. It’s a really neat area that was designed on a big lake so that people can sit out by the water and have a variety of choices. They have a Wednesday night market where they have music in the town square and they have food trucks and people can come and hang out and meet their friends. Lakewood Ranch is always big on recreation and fitness, so they have lots of walking and biking trails throughout the community. I think those are the things that this generation is looking more for. Rather than looking for a specific view, they are prioritizing lifestyle.

MILLIGAN: People are preferring lower maintenance in general. One of the big trends that I’ve seen is that people are just a little bit more ambitious to get out and explore, explore more hobbies, more a nity groups and more social interactions. Concierge service is important to people who have the means to have that convenience, and of course, at the most basic level, pool service, lawn service, those sorts of things. People don’t want to personally fuss over their home quite like our parents used to.

WHAT SETS YOU APART?

MILLIGAN: We have been very intentional about developing leaders within our company. And we really double down those e orts with the people who are most productive. It might seem odd to some people initially, but we help the people in our organization who don’t need help more than we do with people who do need help. And that might sound mercenary if you’re not a student of leadership, but it’s really no di erent than, for example, a bank not wanting to lend money to people who need money so much as they want to lend money to people who don’t need money. That’s really been the philosophy that I’ve had as a leader–when I recognize somebody in our organization as a great up-and-coming leader, I don’t wait for them to ask for support. I

reach out to them and ask, “what more can I do for you to help you gain even more momentum with this success that you’ve already started to attain on an individual basis?” That’s probably the primary secret to our organization’s success. From a cultural perspective, we have a very energetic, enthusiastic group of real estate agents who are very well trained and who love the industry. I receive praise from our peers and other brokerages all the time that whenever they see we are on the side of the transaction they’re having, they always feel confident that it will be as smooth a process as possible. We want to make sure that our agents are exceptionally competent and really doing a nice job for their customers. We’re one of the few, if not only fi rms, that have taken the entire digital media creation process in-house with sta including video production. Literally everything is created from start to fi nish, edited all in-house with our sta . So that has been something that our agents and customers really appreciate. From a branding perspective, we are a luxury brand, but we have positioned ourselves in a way that it feels more like a fresh choice. We’re more of a casual, elegant type of vibe. Customers resonate with that. Of course with the “shore” brand, we exude more of an appreciation for coastal lifestyle. That brand has been resonating nicely with customers and I would say that that is one of the ways that we’re a bit unique.

HOW DO YOU ENGAGE PHILANTHROPICALLY?

HUNIHAN: We are so blessed to be able to build the American dream and we want to support the communities that we build in. Lee has been doing this for decades—supporting the community in a variety of ways but there are a few specific charities that are near and dear to our heart. Lee’s always been a big supporter of the Boys & Girls Club. There are buildings named after him here in town and he’s been on their board and continues to support them. We just recently helped build out a building for them and do

an expansion. Lee also started a Lee Wetherington Foundation that the company supports, through which he supports other local charities. We support the Sarasota Medical Pregnancy Center, which helps women in crisis pregnancy. We’ve also recently joined the Lakewood Ranch Community Fund with their Builders Give Back program.

MILLIGAN: We get behind the individual philanthropic e orts of our agents and we would like to consider Lee Wetherington’s type of template where we unify and combine the collective e orts of our real estate agents to support a charity in a more meaningful way. I am personally involved in SYC Cares at the Sarasota Yacht Club where I am serving on the board as the rear commodore.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE OUR LARGER REGIONAL FOOTPRINT?

MILLIGAN: My analogy, which some fi nd amusing, is that I liken Tampa to Manhattan, St. Pete to Brooklyn and Sarasota to the Hamptons. Sarasota is the vacation spot for the a uent and where people come to play and have fun. St. Pete’s a little bit weird in the best possible way, kind of like Brooklyn. And Tampa is more like Manhattan in the sense that there’s not quite as much beach and boating and people really seem to go there primarily to work. But as far as the markets go, they’re all in pretty good lock step with each other. Average prices are a little bit less in St. Pete than they are in Sarasota, and then even less yet in Tampa. So Tampa would be the most a ordable of the three markets, in general. Right now, more than ever, each little area has its own little micro-market going on. The most choice areas of each of these places are all very hot, very low inventory. But we’re seeing property sit on the market longer that is maybe 15, 20 years old and a little bit cosmetically in need of some updates. We have to be more granular than ever to understand the nuances in whichever type of real estate we’re dealing with in a very specific geographic location.

WHAT’S NEXT?

HUNIHAN: We have five new models coming out of the ground. One of the things that we’ve gotten requests for from people more recently is more of a transitional or contemporary modern design. But you’re also seeing people who are fi rst-time, Florida buyers that want the traditional Florida open design and want to see what they’ve been waiting to buy. So how do you mix those things in the same home? Sometimes we do it with materials, sometimes we do it with the design of the floor plan. Sometimes we do it with maybe a specific room that we can showcase. We’ve now gone to a mixture of materials instead of everything being just tile and stucco and drywall—we’ve mixed metal and wood and stone and concrete, and then some of the traditional tile and drywall. People are looking for more flexible space in their homes. If somebody’s going to have to be in their home, they want to be able to have a place they can relax, a place to work and they want a nice outdoor living area. So what’s next? We’re going to be going to a community down in the Venice and North Port area called Wellen Park. We’ll be opening those models hopefully a little bit less than a year from now in the Everly neighborhood. But we also have some new communities here at Lakewood Ranch. People are now trying to plan technology into their home from the original design standpoint so we have structured wiring included in all of our houses and we try and think about those things from day one. We’re building in Wifi so that homeowners have the ability to move around their house with laptops—we even have Wifi boosters out on the lanai.

MILLIGAN: We added Ken and Jason D’Agostino in St. Pete to spearhead our commercial endeavors a couple years ago and merged with their commercial brokerage. That’s been going really well. We’ve got a very robust commercial side of our operations now. And that’s very active here around Sarasota, but also St. Pete and Tampa, of course, if not moreso in those more larger metro areas.

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