Things To Do In SW Florida

Jeff Ostrowski | (TNS) Bankrate.com

When the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and major brokers last year lost a federal antitrust suit, the verdict unleashed new scrutiny of the industry and its practices. With new commission rules set to go into effect in August as a result of the settlement, critics — even some inside the industry — are growing louder, saying the National Association of Realtors is a “cartel.”

One vocal broker, Mauricio Umansky, head of the national real estate brokerage The Agency, thinks so. “It’s a monopoly,” says Umansky, who’s challenging NAR by heading an alternate organization, the American Real Estate Association. “They control everything.”

NAR disputes such a characterization. After all, the trade group is not just a small circle of powerful individuals: NAR has more than 1.5 million members across the U.S., and barriers to entry are relatively low. In most states, getting a real estate agent’s license requires no college degree and about 60 hours of classroom training. read more

Madyson Fitzgerald | (TNS) Stateline.org

To combat gender and racial wage gaps, nearly a dozen states recently have enacted pay transparency laws that require employers to be more open about the wages and benefits they offer.

Most of the laws require employers to disclose wages in job postings and some bar them from asking a job candidate about their salary history.

“Even though it’s against the law, we definitely still see that women are being paid less than their male counterparts, even though they’re doing the same job,” said Jessica Ramey Stender, a lawyer and the policy director at Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that focuses on sexual harassment and pay discrimination, among other issues. “And that’s a problem.”

Under the federal Equal Pay Act of 1963, employers can’t pay different salaries “on the basis of sex” to employees who do “equal work.” States have similar protections. Nevertheless, women on average have been paid less than men as far back as federal data has been collected. read more

Dori Zinn | (TNS) Bankrate.com

Tune in to HGTV on any given day, and you’ll come across programs where smiling people transform eyesore properties into jaw-droppingly beautiful homes. Sometimes these magicians are professional real estate investors, sometimes they’re just ordinary individuals — but they almost always resell the newly renovated property for a tidy profit.

Welcome to the lucrative world of flipping houses. According to real estate data firm ATTOM, nearly 68,000 U.S. homes were flipped in the first quarter of 2024 alone — that’s one out of every 12 homes sold. What’s more, ATTOM data shows that the flippers typically earned a gross profit of more than 30 percent on each transaction.

Of course, house flipping in real life is almost never as easy as it looks on TV. If you’re interested in giving it a try, here’s a guide to flipping houses for beginners.

What is house flipping?

House flipping is when someone buys a property, holds on to it for a short time and then sells it for a higher price. The quick-turnaround resale is why it’s called a “flip.” So instead of buying a home to live in as a residence, you’re buying it as an investment — in effect, speculating in it as you would a stock. read more

Hundreds of people were trapped in lines, sitting on floors and crowded into waiting areas Friday at Orlando International Airport as a global tech outage canceled flights in and out of the city.

Melbourne Beach resident Brandon Campbell was headed to Costa Rica with his two young daughters, Rory and Bali, for their first surf trip when he got “obviously disappointing” news that their flight on Spirit Airlines was canceled.

“They told us ‘the system’s down, we can’t reschedule you and we’ll email you when we can’,” Campbell said. “We’re going home, there’s no way they’re going to be able to get us on today.”

Campbell, who for a time sat on the floor with his daughters and other passengers whose travel plans had been disrupted, said he was trying not to get upset about the delayed start to the family’s two-week vacation. “It’s out of our control.”

The outages were the result of a faulty update delivered by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike — which provides software to dozens of companies nationwide on computers running Microsoft Windows. The problem impacted airlines around the world. read more

There is a time and place to relax on a cruise ship, but Royal Caribbean’s Utopia of the Seas figures its guests will sleep when they get home.

Leaning into short three- and four-night Bahamas trips, each with a stop at the cruise line’s private Bahamas island Perfect Day at CocoCay, the line is combining its newest ship with its most popular port of call for what it dubs “The World’s Biggest Weekend.”

“You’re going to leave this ship with a couple of days, exhausted. That is our mission — all weekend,” Royal Caribbean International President and CEO Michael Bayley said during a preview cruise ahead of the ship’s debut Friday with paying customers.

The behemoth ship is the second largest in the world behind Icon of the Seas that debuted out of Miami in January, but it’s the largest ever to sail from Port Canaveral and the first time Royal has assigned a new ship short itinerary duties.

As such, the line has taken the 18-deck, 236,473-gross-ton ship with room for 5,668 guests based on double occupancy and crammed the days with shorter, punchier live shows and a cavalcade of parties and live music. read more