Things To Do In SW Florida

By Holden Lewis | NerdWallet

If you’re in the market for a home, you might wonder how you’ll be affected by a class-action lawsuit involving real estate agents and commissions. On April 23, a judge granted preliminary approval to the settlement proposed in March by the National Association of Realtors, which means new rules are on track to go into effect in July or August.

None of which means you have to suspend your home search. Here’s what to know about working with a buyer’s agent this season.

What are the new rules?

In the lawsuit Burnett v. National Association of Realtors et al., a group of home sellers argued that NAR and some major real estate brokerages had enforced rules that effectively limited the sellers’ ability to negotiate on commissions. Sellers have traditionally set the commissions for the agents on both sides of the deal.

As part of the settlement, NAR promised to alter some business practices. The three main changes are:

• Buyers, not sellers, will decide how much the buyer’s agent will be paid for a completed sale.
• Commissions for buyer’s agents will no longer be listed on the multiple listing service, a database of properties for sale in a geographic area. Previously, MLS fields visible only to agents, but not consumers, specified what percentage commission sellers were offering for each property.
• Your agent will be required to “enter into a written agreement” with you before giving you a tour of a home. While such contracts — often called buyer’s agency or buyer-broker agreements — are not new, there’s variation in how they’re implemented. Some states require them already. Some agents sign up buyers before showing properties, while others may explain the arrangement but not ask the buyer to sign anything until there’s a house to make an offer on.

These contracts will likely be mandatory by mid-July, and you can expect your agent to ask you to sign one sometime between now and then. read more

More Space Coast rocket launches mean a crowded fleet of support ships are already pushing Port Canaveral’s limits. So the state commissioned a study that suggests a $2.1 billion solution to give companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin dedicated places to dock.

Space Florida, the state’s aerospace finance and development authority, released Thursday the Florida Spaceport System Maritime Intermodal Transportation Study that’s been in the works for more than a year.

“It was really important for us to make sure we had every stakeholder input throughout the process,” said Space Florida president and CEO Rob Long.

“It’s a pretty comprehensive study,” he said. “It allows us to understand what the scope of the challenge ahead of us would be to meet the demands that we’ve seen in terms of industry.”

The players include NASA, the Space Force, Port Canaveral, commercial launch companies, environmental groups and others as it ranked the pros and cons of six potential locations to expand the port. read more

By MATT OTT (AP Business Writer)

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits was unchanged last week and remains historically low as the labor market continues to show resiliency in the face of high interest rates and elevated inflation.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that unemployment claims for the week ending April 27 was 208,000, the same as the previous week. That’s the fewest since mid-February.

The four-week average of claims, which softens some of the weekly volatility, fell by 3,500 to 210,000.

Weekly unemployment claims are considered a proxy for the number of U.S. layoffs in a given week and a sign of where the job market is headed. They have remained at historically low levels since the pandemic purge of millions of jobs in the spring of 2020.

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark borrowing rate 11 times beginning in March of 2022 in a bid to stifle the four-decade high inflation that took hold after the economy rebounded from the COVID-19 recession of 2020. The Fed’s intention was to loosen the labor market and cool wage growth, which it said contributed to persistently high inflation. read more

By Kate Ashford | NerdWallet

People with dementia who live in long-term care facilities are spending a significant portion of their income each month on care, according to an October 2023 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association (JAMDA). The study found that the median adult with dementia in an assisted living facility spent nearly all of their income (97%) each month on care, and those with dementia living in nursing homes spent 83% of their income each month on care.

Currently, there are nearly 7 million Americans who are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia, says Monica Moreno, the senior director of care and support for the Alzheimer’s Association, a nonprofit that provides support and advocacy for those affected by Alzheimer’s disease. “We also know that with Alzheimer’s disease, we are talking about a progressive disease that has no cure.”

Consequently, as the disease advances, people need more care, and the burden of how to provide that care — and pay for it — often falls to their families. read more

TALLAHASSEE — There will be no slabs of lab-grown meat for sale in Florida.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law Wednesday that bans cultivating, marketing or selling meat grown from animal cells. Violators would face second-degree misdemeanor charges and 60 days in jail.

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said in a news release. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”

The World Economic Forum has stated that people will have to turn to biotechnology and other alternative sources of protein to meet the needs of a growing population and combat climate change.

“Biotechnology holds solutions to both, but we are far from fully realizing its potential to deliver on the green transition,” the agency said in a report in January 2023.

Scientists say 783 million people worldwide are facing food insecurity, a problem that will grow as the population approaches 10 billion by 2050. read more