Trust Group Real Estate Blog

Prepare your business for hurricane season

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – June 1, 2010 – The 2010 hurricane season starts today. Homes should be fortified and larders stocked, and businesses should prepare now for a possible interruption of services. Forecasters already call for an active season with a high likelihood for major hurricanes Category 3 or above.

Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulations (DBPR) hosts a website dedicated to helping residents prepare for a possible hurricane strike. Business owners can input information and the DBPR site will customize a business preparation plan to their unique situation. The DBPR website is at: www.FloridaDisaster.org.

DBPR recommends businesses the following actions for all businesses:

• Store important business records in a watertight container in a safe place.

• Don’t expect cell phones or telephones to work immediately after a storm and plan accordingly.

• Identify essential staff for post-storm recovery and decide predetermined locations for employees to meet when conditions permit.

• Prepare a photo or video inventory of assets and store it in a safe location.

• Make sure you insurance policy payment is up-to-date.

• Maintain detailed expenses that FEMA could use for possible reimbursement.

• Keep some cash on-hand; banking may be unavailable for several days.

© 2010 Florida Realtors®

Storm season’s almost here, be prepared

MIAMI – May 27, 2010 – Scant days before the start of what’s predicted to be a busy hurricane season, federal and state officials reviewed what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to storm forecasting, and urged emergency managers to rethink how they view the public in forming disaster plans.

Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said planners need to adjust their approach on how they view the public during a disaster and its aftermath.

“We literally look at the public as a liability,” Fugate said Wednesday at the 24th annual Governor’s Hurricane Conference at the Broward County Convention Center. “When we talk about the public, we say they need to have a plan.”

But Fugate said the public is not a static entity in the aftermath of a hurricane or other natural disaster. Residents often take action on their own.

“Generally, as we get to a scene, people weren’t waiting for us to get there. They were doing things already,” he said.

Emergency managers need to take advantage of the public’s spirit to act spontaneously. “They should be looking at the public as part of this team,” Fugate said.

The FEMA chief said assisting people during a disaster isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. Simply sending truckloads of ready-to-eat meals to a stricken community won’t help children too young to consume adult food. Or shipping standard military or camping cots to a disaster area won’t help seniors, the disabled or the overweight who may be unable to use them.

“Why are we only planning for healthy adults, who may be more self-sufficient?” he said.

Fugate said emergency managers should give the public a greater role in disaster planning. “It’s trying to change our approach at FEMA to focus on our customers,” he said.

Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center west of Miami, reminded attendees of what’s good and bad in predicting a storm’s characteristics.

What’s good: improvements in the accuracy of forecasting a storm’s path. Due to more sophisticated computer models and more frequent aerial reconnaissance, track forecasting errors have been cut in half over the past 15 years, Read said.

Last year’s 48-hour path predictions, he said, equaled the 24-hour predictions of 10 years earlier. And that trend should keep up. “We’re going to continue improving the track forecast,” he said.

But what’s bad is also scary: Little progress has been made in anticipating how strong a storm could get. “Current models have little or no skill” at predicting a hurricane’s intensity, he said. A storm suddenly growing stronger approaching landfall can greatly hamper efforts to determine if evacuation is warranted.

“With a storm rapidly intensifying near land, you’re not going to have that much lead time,” he said.

Gov. Charlie Crist is scheduled to address the conference Thursday with some grim news of his own: A disturbing number of Floridians at risk from hurricanes are unprepared and unconcerned. According to a Mason-Dixon poll by the National Hurricane Survival Initiative, 17 percent of coastal residents said they would not evacuate even if ordered.

“If people do not heed the evacuation orders, if people don’t move to higher ground,” Fugate said, “we’re going to lose lives.”

Copyright © 2010 Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Robert Nolin. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – May 14, 2010 – The number of Florida foreclosures fell in April from a year earlier, mirroring a national trend that indicates a slowing of defaults on mortgages, according to data released Thursday by RealtyTrac.

Florida's foreclosure fell 18 percent from March and was down 25 percent compared to April 2009. Despite the improvement, the state still posted the second highest number of foreclosures in the nation, however, with 48,384 properties receiving a foreclosure filing during the month.

One in every 182 Florida properties received some type of foreclosure filing, the third highest rate (based on total population) in the country behind Nevada and Arizona. In Nevada, still the poster child of the housing bust, one in every 69 homes was in foreclosure.

Nationally, foreclosure filings fell 2 percent from April 2009, according to the Irvine, Calif.-based company that collects data from more than 2,200 counties nationwide.

The number of foreclosure notices issued fell nationally for the first time since the company began tracking foreclosures in 2005. April also marked an all-time high for bank repossessions, the company reported.

"We expect a similar pattern to continue for most of this year, with the overall numbers staying at a high level and ripples of activity hitting the various stages of the foreclosure process as lenders systematically work through the backlog of distressed properties." says James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, in a statement.

The Fort Myers area posted the nation's fourth highest metro foreclosure rate, with one in every 105 housing units receiving a foreclosure filing. The region continues to dig out from under the housing collapse that followed an extraordinary boom in southwest Florida.

Orlando, meanwhile, dropped out of the top 10 to No. 11 in the monthly poll.

Easing credit and an uptick in economic activity are possible drivers to the lower figures. Federal programs have also helped.

Source: News Service of Florida, Michael Peltier