DELTONA FLORIDA COMMUNITY BUILDERS

[Music] [Music] well there's a lot of talk from people who call themselves revolutionaries now do you consider yourself a revolutionary rather think we're evolutionary and uh perhaps revolutionary in the sense that we're evolving maybe faster than the times at least we'd like to think so suppose someone has heard about deltona corporation and you don't know what he's heard what would you tell him to make sure that that he has it straight we built communities when we we try to build them ahead of their times he had a man's needs then a man's needs seem to be changing fast or what he wants so we have to think 10 years ahead of ourselves if you were a young man now and had a chance to go into this line of work would you look for a job with deltona corporation oh absolutely deltona is a young company in itself its ambitions are great many things it can do in florida and there's also things to be done outside of florida we have the versatility now of the manufactured home many many things that we can do we're just really getting started my father started the construction business in 1908 from that beginning i stand here my brother stands here and we've developed what we think is the finest organization known to this area anyway what have you built well my father built camp gordon fort mcpherson atlanta and world war one built many commercial buildings throughout the south during the 20s and 30s and my brothers and i built the naval base at key west during the war about 15 million worth of work that didn't sound like much now would i suppose on today's dollar would be like 100 million or something like that we've built probably 25 30 000 homes in the state of florida many many commercial buildings what are the communities well the first one of course deltona which is some eight years old now and has uh i guess 10 000 people living there and that's near deland florida halfway between daytona and orlando you've had a chance to see what happens at deltona in fact you call your corporation right after the first community that you develop what has happened there what are the people like it's become a typical american community i think people i talk to say they're more active in deltona they ever work wherever they live first place they have more time for it and somehow other people are in a friendlier mood and they all talk to each other and they all belong to clubs and they all seem to be very active it's an active retirement kind of a thing it isn't retirement in the sense that they go down and just lay down and look at the sun so you get a really a dynamic and an electric feel their faces seem to be bright and smiling very few grumblers the few grumblers that are there eventually leave they don't want to be around a lot of happy people i guess then it wouldn't be too hard to find a fishing buddy no not at all not at all to be the opposite i think if you only had three people to get in a boat to be more applicants go fishing but it's not just all fishing either or even growing flowers and they want other things to do so we've started an adult education school there i think we have five or six hundred enrolled in it where people can take all sorts of courses to improve their minds or creativeness this has gone on for seven years now and keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger what does don think of the way doesn't have been growing of course don was associated with it from almost the day it was born and i think don if you asked him would say it's one of the best things ever happened to him he just thinks deltona's just super just beautiful he would feel the same as i did that it was his first love deltona we started spring hill some four years later after deltona was started all of the lots are sold out of virtually all of those lots are sold there are a few scattered lakefront lots of left we are still building and selling homes however and there's probably 1500 homes built there or under construction it has golf course shopping centers property set aside for schools and it is the nucleus of a new city and i guess you'd say a small a city is being born there will evolve much as deltona's evolved then the citrus springs which was opened a year ago last january it's over a half sold in lots and i would guess another year will be sold out it has i think 200 houses either under construction or completed and it will evolve just to spring hill and deltona then there's saint augustine shores which is six miles south of st augustine florida on us-1 and goes from us-1 to the montanzas river and this a little different community although it's directed mostly the same kind of a market in that it's more self-contained self-maintained you pay a fee for maintenance and that was just open in january and i think there's about 150 homes there but it's and it's primarily for our manufactured home division in other words all those homes at st augustine are manufactured homes which really is to say that the homes are the same basically they're fha approved southern building code approved on a concrete foundation they're just built in a factory and put in place as descended from building uh out in the field newest one uh sunny hill will just open in june 20 000 acres in extent this had great acceptance from the beginning i guess we sold more property at sunny hills at the start of it than we did any other project where is that this is north of uh panama city which is in northwest florida and it's beautiful rolling country lovely lakes on it heavily wooded but we've added about five thousand acres of what we call green belt which would be nature trails and so on this is an indication of the changing or evolutionary process of planning something and trying to plan for the future it's the first time we have deliberately put green belt areas within the community and i think it's going to be a thing that we'll continue to do what kind of activities will take place in in the green belt which i i assume are natural yeah nature trails and picnic areas and are there lakes in the sunny hills yes it's beautiful lakes the one big one gap lake which is very large lake and then there's other very nice small lakes spotted through the area well if someone went to sunny hills he wouldn't see very much now what would what would uh be his best way to find out what's going to happen at sunny hill well if he went to sunny hills he would see a considerable there is a road system at the start of a shopping center and there's model homes and there's a recreation building and the start of a road system that would show you generally speaking what your property will look like when it's finished even though you may not be able to stand on a particular lot that you're thinking about buying but a better way to see it i would think is to see the general area of sunny hill after being there then you could go to deltona spring hill citrus springs and see a more mature community premier exactly like sunny hills will be where we have delivered thousands of lots and built thousands of houses and have complete communities with shopping centers and churches and all the rest of it so you're seeing a uh facsimile then of sunny hills if you visit those other projects you haven't mentioned marco island have you forgotten it already well no i'd forgotten that that's a that's our that's a big daddy i guess you'd call it marco is of course a different oriented to a different market and it's uh it's about 80 percent waterfront property on the gulf of mexico and it's higher priced property lots of probably an average of fourteen fifteen thousand dollars and we build houses there that uh around the forty thousand dollar range so it's for a more affluent person the appreciation and value of course has been very dramatic at uh marco as it has in other places but this is basically what we don't know i haven't forgotten marco we're building up we're building a 400 room hotel there and next door to our present 150 room hotel it'll be the largest hotel on the gulf coast of florida we'll be able to handle a convention of 1200 people well how is mark island framed for instance as a i think a beautiful example of uh well of a planned place yes well of course this is what we started out to do acquired a large piece of land one which had limits to it so that within that border we could plant all the amenities of a city without this piecemeal adding on to it or whatnot so we went out got a big enough piece of land to support population and have road systems that would carry the eventual traffic would have natural preserves to preserve a great deal of the fish and wildlife and the birds preserve the things that are there now for future citizens of the city we're building well you're almost walled in at marco aren't you there's rookery bay on the north of us which is controlled by i believe the audubon society on the east of us is aquatic preserve 14 to the east of that is seminole state park and to the east and wrapping around all of it is the everglades national park and we have recently on the south of us agreed with the state to turn over those lands lying south of taxamas pass and they will be kept in their natural state and of course on the west of us the gulf of mexico so we're completely surrounded by natural preserves so to speak you're walled in then and you have to decide now what mark island will be 10 years from now and 15 years from now and so on well that's right and that's what we're doing for instance we have a team of marine biologists and naturalists on the staff of marco island that evaluates measures the amounts of kind of fish and so on that are in the area we're creating artificial reefs off in the gulf so we're in the planning process the environmental considerations play a much greater role and much more scientific role we used to say well let's leave this island for the birds we knew that there was a nice place for birds to live we didn't know quite why now we are learning why there are quite a few birds there oh yeah there's plenty of birds are they congregate all over the place including the golf course and the ocean and people's lawns i guess they seem to be everywhere i go around marco and of course they largely roost in the mangrove islands that are being undisturbed south of us are you a bird watcher no sir i'm not i like to look at them and a beautiful thing but i wouldn't know one another the pelicans have disappeared in california and also in greece and yet there are a lot of them on marco this is one of the concerns of our environmental staff headed by george spinner is doing some quantitative studies on how many pelicans there are how many egrets they are and so on and indeed how many snook there are between us and lost river whatever 40 miles away i don't know how he's going to count all these but i'm sure he probably would have some kind of a quantitative measurement of the amount of pelicans are there joe gary giola is a friend of yours what does he think about florida really down deep as a catcher who made it big what does he really think of florida i think joe is one of florida's great admirers and i think he thoroughly loves it himself and i know his family does and to him it's a like going to heaven you know leaving the activity that he's surrounded with and the environment if you will of that he's living in and i'm sure that in the back of his mind that he tends to spend more and more time down here as his program will or his activities will permit and in time he probably end up living here most of the time how often has he been here during the past year maybe four or five times in the last year he's coming again in november what else are you uh up to well we have what really is a new product which is a community with no less than acre lots and we'll go up to five acres or more if you want to buy two five acre lots which will be new in our concept and roughly half of it you could own a horse and keep it on your lot in other words stable it on your lot if you wanted to it will have equestrian ways we can ride horse trails i guess you'd call them it's right uh contiguous to citrus springs as a matter of fact near dunnellon florida southwest of ocala the other half of the community will be also acre enough lots will be built around the golf course and you will not be able to keep a horse on your lot but you can and do have access to the stable area in the other part of the project oh you run these things like an arab chief no we think it's a really another product designed for the man that wants a little room wants a little land wants a little openness a little privacy as against some of the other places where the lots are not that large so it is really another product that we've never developed before what else is new we have two manufacturing plants one of which is open and in production and has been in production for some time in sarasota florida another one in st augustine in which they built a complete house which is fha approved meet building codes and is a house in the conventional sense that it's a full manufactured house each plant has a capacity of about a thousand homes a year on one shift about 1800 homes on two ships at each plant well how often are you able to get over to your manufacturing place to find out how they're doing i mean do you have to ride pretty close heard on your house building factories well i go over there perhaps once a month but it really it runs pretty well and i guess maybe a little parental pride in that and that my son runs it and runs it so well it really doesn't need that much attention you'll always go back to what uh i've heard her the mackel first my guess is that many people would think that everybody does what you call the mackerel first well the three michael first as you know waterline to each lot limited size and a coordinated growth plan which allows a purchaser to fit his retirement needs to the progress of our construction and to his payments it really takes a new piece of land to do this you can't take existing acreage where you have been selling for some years on a let's say one plan basis of a 10-year payout or something could you tell me something about the insurance policies and would that qualify as a as a mackel iv well yes i think it would be a big michael fourth really what is it well actually it insures a purchaser of a lot under certain conditions uh on his life that if he should die his unpaid balance is paid by the insurance company and that's an unusual thing of course and this is one of the things that people have said to us over the years you know a particular middle-aged couple that says the husband wants to buy the lot my wife said well honey if something happens to you i can't keep these payments up because all i have is some some of your insurance or something else but so this overcomes that risk of somebody embarking on a program making their payments then something happened to their health that is they die it's simply a great sales plus because it's great for the customer it all comes back to that it's good for the customer then it's a good uh thing for all of us do people outside of the united states buy property in deltona corporation communities oh yes yes we we have a great deal of buyers and all of our product from all over the world really south america the far east europe sweden what advantage is it to them are they going to move to florida well i would think that uh most of the people in buying in those areas would be buying for investment purposes appreciation and value there are some and some already who have built and are are living at deltona for instance and i suppose to some extent they're thinking of the world growing smaller and and a future supersonic jet and those sort of things but i would guess more than anything it would be the foreign nationals and would be vying for investment appreciation purposes is the land any good well of course it's it's it's hand picked by us as the most desirable land for its intended purpose of the state of florida so the land itself is physically the finest and then value of course then is created by building a community because to take land even beautiful land and divide it up and put some roads in and divided up three lots of the acre just isn't going to increase to the extent certainly that it will by reason of building the community on it where people come and live this of course is our main first thing that we are builders and we are committed and dedicated to building as many houses or homes as possibly can in these communities to make the community grow people make value things are are mixed up in our cities now i heard one land planner say there's not one decent city in the united states whether or not that's true do you think that your communities are a return to the 1930s i don't know what you mean return of the 1930s but our cities certainly are are not going to have the ills that some of our big cities have now otherwise would be poor planters our cities should avoid all the mistakes of the past at least those known eras of the past we have the land now we have the full freedom to plant it as it should be planned the problems that we know about today we are planning to cure in the future it used to be that sewer plants were never owned by private developers or rarely and as florida grew and there were no sewers out there so we had to go build a sewer and own it and operate ourselves we're not particularly interested in being in that business but we have to do it in for looking to the future how can you do all this all by yourself well i don't do it all by myself first off i have another brother i had a third brother who retired last year neil barr is the chief operating officer executive vice president you and neil barr is that the extent of that no no no there's there's my brother robert as i keep saying senior vice president charge of engineering and architecture jim ventzel i guess jim is playing more cities than any man in the world from the word go i mean from from just raw acreage to a creation of the whole city our senior vice president bill o'dowd he runs all the construction and handles all the financial affairs of company and under those people are a whole list of perhaps 15 vice presidents who have specialty departments like public relations or engineering you have great control then over all these have complete control of course we're a very very unique company and i don't think there's any that i know of that has the capacity that we have in-house we have our own utility can design and construction division we have our own land planners within the uh company we have our own architectural department we have our own uh financial department we are a self-contained company they can do everything without walking out of the front door almost literally did it ever occur to you that you're doing what mussolini was doing well we do it in a little different way we operate under the under the umbrella of a democracy and we're not trying to change the political uh aspect we're dealing with building and not guiding people's lives we try to maybe help show them a direction to go but they still go the direction they want to go do you think that florida will be the signpost to the future i really think that florida has all those things that are needful for the future to be a graceful beautiful wonderful place to live and one of its greatest assets is its drinking water supply and we are now in florida being conscious of the management of this even though it's a great supply of making sure that it's not uh overused but drinking water it will be is and will be probably the most important thing for man's development how big a factor do you think disney world will be what effect will it have on florida well i think the biggest effect it will have is that many millions of people will make it a point to see florida that might not have ever seen it and once they see it i think by and large the majority will be amazed at how beautiful it is and either want to come back as a tourist or come back and live and retire so it's really it's really kind of like a big ad the state of florida i have one more uh where are you going where am i going well i i hope the along with my brother and the others lead this company into greater things build perhaps out of this state and into other states i mean that's my ambition that's with the ambitions we had when we started out we have all the ingredients that are necessary to become a great and i use this word loosely but the number one company in this business and you can stay honest and do it it has to start from there otherwise it won't work [Music] you