You want a four bedroom, three bath house for $176,500?
Line up outside Lauderhill City Hall.
A housing lottery held by Lauderhill brought more than 1,000 would-be homeowners to apply. Only 13 lucky winners will be able to buy a home in this affordable housing program held by the city.
The winners of the lottery will be living in the Renaissance Village residence about a year from now. Lucky people, huh?
“It’s a blessing and if it happens, the Lord knows I’ll be grateful,” said Suzanne Palmer, a 34-year-old single mother of three from Sunrise who has applied twice to get a bank loan to purchase a home but has been consistently rejected. She heard about the lottery from a coworker and decided to apply since she fit the criteria of the lottery: She earns $23,000 a year working as a state agency secretary, which is well below the lottery ceiling of $49,100 for a household of hour.
So Suzanne waiting in line for about an hour to fill out an informational index card. Four hours passed for the long line winding around City Hall to dissipate. When the clock hit 8 o’clock and officials declared registrations were over, 1050 registrations were declared, said Vincent Miller, manager of the city’s Office of Business and Neighborhood Enrichment.
“Our phones have been ringing off the hook for the past two to three weeks. We’ve been taking 45 to 50 calls a day,” Miller said.
Renaissance Village, which is being created under an agreement among Broward County, Lauderhill and Sunrise-based developer GL Homes, is scheduled for construction by next year with about 26 affordable upscale homes.
How the city will help the new homeowners is by paying the closing costs and down payments and offering as much as $20,000 in grant money. Great deal!
Development will occur at Northwest 55th Avenue and Northwest 21st Street later this year and the homes will be open by mid-year 2008, county officials said. Price will range from $158,500 for a three-bedroom house of 2,300 square feet to $176,500 for a four-bedroom house of 2,652 square feet.
“It sounds like they’re getting the homes for half price,” says Joe Zdanowicz, director of real property in the Broward County Property Appraiser’s Office.. “Homes like the ones being offered are normally in excess of $350,000, I don’t care where you are in the county.”
In Broward county from 2005 to 2006, the average market value for a single-family home was $332,100 and the average for the Lauderhill area was $203,000.
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