- Junior Dowie/Staff Photographer
Glen Eyre apartments on Seymour Avenue is one of the many gated communities in the Corporate Area attracting residents for security reasons.
Howard Walker, Staff Reporter
HOMEOWNERS ARE vacating traditional family-style houses in upscale neighbourhoods for more secure and economical apartments and townhouses, real estate agencies are reporting.
"There is a definite trend in the movements from the bungalow-style houses to the townhouses because of security and maintenance," said a spokesperson for JN Real Estate Company Ltd.
"In a gated community, you go in and someone is there watching you. Although a lot of people go for the armed response thing, when a house in Jacks Hill or Cherry Gardens uses one, until the five or 10 minutes that the armed response takes to arrive, there is nobody to help you. At the townhouse complex, in the five or 10 minutes the response team takes to arrive, your neighbours would be alerted also," the real estate agent said.
He said that is why the armed response companies are making so much money. "Every complex has one. Hawkeye, Brinks, Technology Plus, Electro Guard, you can name several. If you have an armed response team that is working with townhouses in a complex, it is just one team that is working 20 townhouses. When they go there it is just one location.
"If they have 20 people on Cherry Drive, they would have to drive the whole length of Cherry Drive. The chance of everybody on Cherry Drive using the same armed response team is not great. If Electro Lock is inside a townhouse complex, everybody uses Electro Lock. So they just respond to the scheme."
Houses in the affluent St. Andrew areas of Cherry Gardens, Norbrook, Jacks Hill, Russell Heights, Smokey Vale, Stony Hill and Beverly Hills are being put up for sale for as much as $23 million or are being rented for as high as $206,000 monthly.
In Norbrook, a four-bedroom house with four bathrooms, study, staff quarters, hot water and air conditioning is being rented for US$3,500 (J$206,000) per month; a three-bedroom in Russell Heights goes for US$2,500 (J$147,500); a fully furnished three-bedroom house in Jacks Hill would cost US$3,500 (J$206,000) and a single room on Sandhurst Crescent, off Hope Road is being rented for US$800 or J$47,000.
Meanwhile, the sale price for some of these upscale one-bedroom apartment-style houses is about $3.5 million, and the two bedroom apartments/townhouses sell from $6 million upwards. In other middle-class areas these two-bedroom apartments/townhouses cost approximately $4 million.
"The single-family homes are taking a beating right now," said Valerie Levy of Levy Valerie & Associates. "There is definitely a trend as these residents are moving into the gated communities mainly because it is secure, there is a common pool area and it cuts down on the expenses."
At the same time, Lascelles Poyser, managing director of New World Realtors dismissed suggestions that some of the older dwelling houses were being vacated by people emigrating.
JOBS
"People are not really emigrating to live, they are going into jobs. They are holding on to what they have. They are not emigrating because Jamaica is bad. They are keeping their houses for rental and keeping a foot in Jamaica," he said.
For those moving into the more secure apartment complexes, he said they basically want to live in a cluster where everything is done.
"When they reach home, the security guard lets them in, they just park their cars and head straight to their TVs. The helper comes and spends a day or two and gone again. They don't think about garbage or to cut the lawn. This is North American-style living."
He also suggested that it was the poorer set of people who are buying the big houses nowadays.
Marlene Jones of Marlene Jones and Associates suggested, on the other hand, that most residents in these upscale houses are now using them as investments to be rented by foreigners including diplomats.
"That's the clientele they are looking for as the average Jamaican can't afford these rents," she said. "Most of these residents have taken out mortgages on these houses in U.S. dollars because the interest rates were lower than the local rates. They were not expecting the dollar to slide so quickly. Now they have to find other sources to fund these debts," Ms. Jones said.
She also pointed out that a lot of these residents have children attending schools overseas, therefore the need for foreign exchange.
David McNulty, managing director of CD Alexander, emphasises that "The houses are a bit big so they rent a part of it. It's nothing unusual. We know there are a lot of people emigrating. But it has been going on for years. People are scaling down from the maintenance of a large house and more often than not, the children are getting older, they don't need such a big place.
"Whenever a family is broken up and only two persons might be left in the big house, the apartment-style houses become more affordable."
But, according to Valerie Levy, the demand for these apartment-style houses has created a property shortage. "But it's not much worse than any other time. Some people have listed their properties and when the dollar starts to slide, they withdraw it because of the uncertainty of where it's going to end and what they can do with the money they are going to get."
