How a Detroit auto salesman turned a neglected Florida Shore line into a $75,000-an-acre "paradise."

   Ever since the spectacular collapse of the Florida real-estate market that seemed so rainbow-hued back in the 1920's, conservative businessmen in the Sunshine State have been inclined to regard "boom" as a decidedly unpleasant word. For this reason they have, until recently, been extremely reluctant to admit what appears to be the case: that their state is once more in a highly interesting condition.

   In the past couple of years there has been a noteworthy revival of that old heady feeling, chiefly in the vicinity of Fort Lauderdale, a coastal city between Miami and Palm Beach. At a business breakfast there recently, for instance, the Coral Ridge Development Company sold $2,000,000 worth of residential lots within ten minutes, a feat which inevitably set old-timers thinking back to the gaudy days of thirty years ago.

   Beneath the surface hoopla, however, observers noted distinct differences between this sale--and the present boom, which it represents-and the dizzy doings of the '20's. Back then, buyers paid astonishing sums for pieces of Florida, to be sure, but they paid mainly in paper and promises. By contrast, those who bought from Coal Ridge paid hard cash-as much as $15,000 for one fifth of an acre.

   Furthermore, they knew very well what they were getting--home sites systematically reclaimed from the swamps and jungles just north of the city--whereas in the earlier boom, many people bought land they had never seen, frequently winding up with bogs full of mosquitoes, snakes and alligators.

   This breakfast sale was the idea of a hard-driving former automobile salesman named James S. (for Stone) Hunt who with his partner, Stephan A. Calder, has made Coral Ridge Florida's largest land-developement concern. For the occasion, Hunt invited a number of his friends--about 600 of them, mostly real-estate men, civic leaders and city and county officials--to join him for ham and eggs at the Governors' Club Hotel.

   In addition to feeding these people, he wanted them to meet Arthur T. Galt, a Chicago millionaire from whom Coral Ridge had bought 2466 acres of rugged territory on the edge of town two years earlier. The price, $19,389,000, had been widely publicized as approximately three times what Spain was paid for the whole state of Florida.

   Mr. Galt, who is seventy-nine, made a few appropriate remarks and then it was time for the breakfast's second phase. A hush fell as Hunt stepped up to the speakers' table. A sturdily built man of medium height, Hunt at fifty-eight, has a pink, plump face, a carefully trimmed mustache and a high forehead crowned with receding white hair. He was immaculate, as usual, in a white coat, dark trousers, white shirt with long collar points and a light blue tie.

   Though his mustache was seem to quiver slightly, his voice was admirably steady as, laying his watch on the table, he announced, "During the next four minutes we are going to sell two million dollars' worth of lots."

   On cue, a big board shot up at one end of the room, showing an enlarged plot of the area he proposed to sell. There were 192 lots, the first section developed by Coral Ridge from the former Galt property. Prices ranged from $9400 for an eighty-by-one hundred-foot lot with no water frontage, up to $17,800 for slightly larger lots on the corners of recently dug canals and the Intracoastal Waterway.

   A man in the rear jumped up, waved his arms to attract attention and shouted. "I'll buy lots Twenty-one through Thirty-two!"

   A young woman bounced up at the board and stamped blue slips of paper over the lots he had named. Other buyers began yelling the numbers of the lots they wanted. Runners appeared to take their names and orders.

   Meanwhile, Hunt kept his eyes on his watch. The four minute deadline approached, then passed with lots still unsold; yet Hunt remained splendidly cool. Five minutes ticked by, six minutes, seven---- But in exactly nine minutes and thirty-five seconds the two million dollars' worth of lots was gone, most of them bought by independent real estate men for resale.

   Buyers were given forty hours to put up at least half of the purchase price or surrender their options. Some would-be buyers sent in deposits for lots which had been optioned to others in hopes that the successful bidders might fail to go through with the sale. But after forty hours practically every original bidder had made his payment and Coral Ridge had to return nearly two hundred checks.

   Bill Baggs, columnist for the Miami Daily News, wrote that when the breakfast ended, "a little old lady near me (she was Mrs. Frank Stranahan, who once helped her late husband run an Indian trading post in Lauderdale) peeped over her gloriosa corsage and excitedly said, 'My, I haven't seen anything like this in thirty years!'
   "And neither", commented Baggs, "had anybody else." Ever since this event, Hunt has been considered something of a civic leader, and his staff is now frequently called upon to organize fund-raising and other meetings for various onward-and-upward groups.

   Two years ago Hunt was hardly known in Florida beyond Fort Lauderdale, but now one Miami editor has called him "probably the leading evangelist of our South Florida religion: ' That the American people, growing wealthier and wiser, will all want to gravitate to this strip of paradise.'" "You can take the corn flakes from Battle Creek," Hunt says. "You can take the furniture from Grand Rapids and remove the stoves from Kalamazoo. But you can't take the sunshine from Florida." Plastered throughout his office building are copies of his slogan: THERE IS NOTHING ON EARTH LIKE EARTH.

   In 1946, its first year, Coral Ridge sold $500,000 worth of lots and it has been picking up momentum ever since. Its sales were $1,009,000 in 1953, $5,500,000 in 1954 and better than $10,000,000 in 1955. Not without some justification its activities are considered an important reason why Broward County (Fort Lauderdale) is the fastest-growing county in Florida, fastest-growing of the states." The more than 2000 homes already built on land developed by Coral Ridge are called "the world's largest group of homes in the $20,000 to $40,000 class." And another 7500 new homes are expected to be built within the next five to ten years on the 2466 acres that Hunt began selling at his $2,000,000 breakfast. In addition, there will be apartment buildings, restaurants and shopping centers, including one proposed $5,000,000 center with air-conditioned streets.

   Cream of the property is a mile of virgin beach, the last sizable undeveloped ocean front available between Palm Beach and Miami, according to real-estate authorities. Coral Ridge expects to sell this strip as sites for perhaps two dozen plush hotels. At this writing, however, no hotel managements had bought sites, possibly because Hunt and Calder had imposed such stern building restrictions. For example, no hotel will be permitted to occupy more than 75 percent of the frontage it owns. These rules are intended to preserve the beauty of the entire strip, but with land costing $2000 a front foot, this sort of thing is a little hard for hotel operators to swallow.

   Hunt, who used to own one of the world's largest Chevrolet agencies in Detroit, claims that the principles he employed to sell cars work equally well in merchandising earth in Florida. His promotional ideas, while often theatrical, are as predictably successful as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner sales campaign. In short, like other leaders of the new boom in Florida real estate, Hunt and Calder have cut down on the hot air, if not the high jinks, in favor of the hard dollar. And even their most extravagant tactics seem positively conservative when contrasted with some of the methods used thirty years ago.

   Back in the '20's, for instance, one group of promoters ordered a sign proclaiming: MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL WILL BE ERECTED HERE, but couldn't raise even the eighteen dollars to pay the painter. Another group advertised a subdivision, Manhattan Estates, as "not more than three quarters of a mile from the thriving city of Nettie." Nettie was an abandoned turpentine camp.

   Promoters of several developments, including Boca Raton, buried doubloons, pieces of eight and fake relics of Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan and Blackbeard, which they arranged to have dug up amid scenes of wild excitement. Soon thousands of people were wielding spades all over Florida, seeking pirate gold--and that became another reason to buy property.

   Hunt and Calder have never buried any pirate gold; they find it equally effective to plant certificates good for United States currency in capsules in a fish bowl. No capsule is worth less than ten dollars. Some are worth fifty dollars, a lesser number $100; two are worth $250 and one $500. When an independent real-estate man sells a Coral Ridge lot, he is allowed to draw a capsule as a reward besides his regular commission. In addition to this, the firm occasionally holds a big sales contest with prizes ranging from TV sets to trips to Europe.

   Waving such carrots in front of salesmen had proved as useful a gimmick as rewarding poets for writing verses about the land, as some 1920's developers did. J.W. Young hired Helen Morgan and Elsie Janis--the latter at $100 a minute--to warble about Hollwood-by-the-Sea--one of the sounder developments, incidentally.

   At the height of the frenzy, rabble rousers and preachers, auctioneers and lawyers were paid ten dollars an hour to shout about this or that development. Airplanes wrote about them in smoke against the tropic sky, while scarlet-coated trumpeters tootled at potential buyers from the tops of buses. Elephants wore sandwich signs advertising real estate in Miami. Paul Whiteman and his orchestra played and Mary Garden sang grand opera in a tent to promote sales of lots in Coral Gables.

   The Gables, although perhaps the leading example of sound conception and orderly planning among the 1920's subdivisions, nevertheless had its exotic moments. An associate has told how George Merrick, its developer, used to get a group of friends in to help him choose names for new streets, with the aid of a bottle of rum and a Spanish dictionary. Sometimes, when the rum got the better of discretion, they would pick out names meaning Avenue of the Dead or Graveyard Boulevard or Roadway of Robbers. Later on, these names were changed quietly.

   Merrick's most famous promotion stunt was hiring William Jennings Bryan, the great orator. Bryan used to stand beneath a giant umbrella on a barge moored in a lagoon. Facing crowds gathered on the shore line, he would dwell at length and in glowing language upon the wonders of the Florida climate and the excellence of the Florida radish. After the Great Commoner had finished, Gilda Gray, the shimmy sensation of that era, would dance on the barge for the assembled multitudes.

   It was a 1920's boom practice for sellers to accept as little as a tenth of the sale price--or even the buyers note--as down payment on propery. M.A. Hortt, veteran Fort Lauderdale real-estate broker, tells of scrub-pine land he bought in 1911 for $3200. He sold it for $58,000 in 1924, then bought it back in a few days later for $116,000. In May, 1925, he sold the property again, for $282,000. Thirteen days later it went for $640,000. In another three months and five days it brought $800,000. Finally, a couple of months after that, it sold for $1,500,000. As all these sales turned out to have been mainly on paper, however, the land eventually reverted to Hortt.

   Under the Coral Ridge system, the buyer must pay at least half down and the remainder within two years. Most developers allow a broker who has sold one of their lots to retain part of the down payment as his commission, but Coral Ridge keeps the down payment intact until the deal is consummated, so the buyer can have his money returned immediately if he changes his mind. Hunt and Calder say that when a wavering buyer learns he can get his money back at once, he usually decides that he wants the property after all.

   During the 1920's, many Florida homes were built in the style of medieval castles and Spanish monasteries. There were some pretty weird structures. But when a buyer gets a lot in Coral Ridge, he is not allowed to build just any sort of house he fancies. Hunt maintains that the automobile business taught him that the most radical models go out of style first. Deeds to the homesites he sells specify that only houses of the simplest architecture may be built there. If, as some people complain, this gives all the Coral Ridge homes an uninteresting sameness, the partners reply that at least their policy protects Coral Ridge investors from having somebody build an architectural horror next door.

   "The value of a man's house," Hunt says, "depends on the value of his neighbor's house. The architecture that we permit is not very flashy. It is like a blue serge suit. It will always be in fashion."

   Instead of feeding prospects oratory, as George Merrick did, Hunt feeds breakfast to Fort Lauderdale's real-estate fraternity. For more than three years he has invited the 650 local brokers and salesmen to break bread five mornings each week. Sixty is average attendance. Guests arrive to the strains of martial music played over an amplifier. This puts them in a spirited mood. They are served orange juice, sweet rolls and coffee by the firm's stenographers. Then a pep team of Coral Ridge men--John Hagan, Ted Dunn and Andrew Manno--announces with placards, maps and loud shouting which lots the firm is presently offering and which have been sold since breakfast the day before.

   The guests are informed that it is their patriotic duty to let no visitor to Fort Lauderdale escape without being shown some property. They are urged to write countless letters to prospects, even if they have to get their lists from the telephone directories of distant cities. Now and then Joseph P. Taravella, executive vice-president of Coral Ridge, will notice that some of the guests' attention is wandering. This is not to be tolerated.

   "Make a note of this information!" Taravella may shout from the rear of the room. "Never come to these meeting without paper and a pencil! We are only trying to help you make some money!"

   Hunt usually sits quietly through these breakfasts, but occasionally an idea smites him so forcefully that he is impelled to arise and speak.

   "Lord knows how long that will go on," one of his regular guests observed recently when Hall was so moved. "He gets glassy-eyed when he talks about real estate."

   Now and then the programs take on a lighter note. The men of Coral Ridge may put on a skit demonstrating the proper way to sell a lot, rent an apartment or show visitors the local beaches. Once the brokers even treated their captive audience to a breakfast minstrel show featuring lyrics they had written about the elegance of local properties.