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Choose Your Florida Retirement Destination

It’s easy to push retirement to the perimeter of our minds when life is busy with family, careers, commitments and other adult priorities. But it’s never wise to allow retirement to slip out of sight. Regardless of whether it looms sooner or later, you should consider how and where you’d like to spend it. Read on for our suggestions on choosing Florida as your retirement destination.
Why Florida?
Let’s assume you want to be here, or that Florida is on your short list of potential locales. The lure is obvious if you hail from a colder climate. The Sunshine State’s year-round […]

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‘Nobody Told Me!’ Home-Buying Fees Explained Here

No matter your tax bracket or life circumstance, buying a new custom home is one of the largest financial transactions you’ll make. There’s no dismissing that fact, but if you’re a first-time buyer, you should understand that it-costs-lots-of-money means more than simply a big outlay of cash. For example, your credit health must be good. You must be approved for a mortgage. You must be able to make a down payment to activate your mortgage. But you also must pay obligatory transaction fees during the home-buying process. Here’s a primer so you won’t have to say, “but nobody told […]

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Building a New Home? Mistakes to Avoid

So you’re moving to Florida and you’re intent on building a custom home. At ICI Homes, this is what we do. We’re known for our customizable floor plans and creativity, and our customers’ wish lists often are the launching pad for many happy builder-buyer partnerships.

However, since we’ve built custom homes all over the state for more than three decades, our designers and architects are really good at sniffing out potential problems. We’ve cataloged some of the most universal ones below. Read on to avoid these mistakes when you build your new custom home — with us in Florida, or wherever […]

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ICI Homes Wins Five Awards at 2017 Jacksonville Area Parade of Homes

The Jacksonville Area Parade of Homes Banquet was held on March 18th, 2017. ICI Homes was the proud recipient of five awards.

Silver: The Serena at Tamaya
400k-420k Category

Silver: The Brooke at Outlook at Nocatee
560k-580k Category

Gold: The Egret II at Amelia National
420k-440k Category

Gold: The Egret V at Amelia National
540k-560k Category

Gold: The Brooke at Tamaya
560k-580k Category

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Buying Vs. Renting Part 5: Our Best Advice

Buying a home is a serious adult activity. None of it is one-size-fits-all. We’re as individual as our DNA and life situations, and it’s silly for us — or anyone — to dictate decisions to you. Our goal in Buying Versus Renting is drilling down to basics, using practical realities and our experience from more than three decades as Florida’s Custom Home Builder.

Once you’re ready to buy a new home, view your situation through the lens of our suggestions, just as you’d apply a magnifying glass to the fine print of an advertisement.

Clarity is what we want for all […]

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Buying Vs. Renting Part 4: Home Sweet Where?

When you’re deciding whether to leave the rent cycle and buy a new home, many factors compete for your attention. The financial one is the weightiest.

“Property taxes!” pundits, experts and media howl. “You don’t pay those as a renter.”

“Home maintenance costs!”

“You’ll lose money if you sell you home before you establish equity!”

Then there’s your financial health, the critical first step to becoming a new homeowner.

At some point you must form your own responses to the rhetoric above based on your life stage, age, career and family situation. Helping you do that is a major impetus behind our five-part Buying […]

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Buying Vs. Renting Part 3: How To Find A Home

At ICI Homes, we think home buying is a good thing. We’re walking you through all the major considerations of it, so you can make your most informed decision — crucial if you’re a renter seeking to make a change.

In Part I of our Buying Versus Renting series, we offered a birds-eye view of the positives of home ownership. In Part 2, we walked through personal financial basics that form the foundation of any home purchase.

In Part 3, we offer helpful guidelines for your new-home search. To help you focus on the exercise, let’s agree you’re interested in a […]

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Buying Versus Renting Part 2: The Money Stuff

In the financial, homebuilding and real-estate industries, the question of buying a home versus renting one prompts all sorts of calculators, graphics and pro-and-con discussions. It’s a perpetual topic that ebbs and flows according to interest rates and financial markets.

Full disclosure: we’re not crunching all those numbers here.

However, we at ICI Homes are positive that home-buying is a good long-term decision on multiple levels, as we detailed in Part I of our Buying Versus Renting series. So let’s assume you’d like to buy your first home. What comes next?
How’s your financial health?
If your reply is “let’s discuss something else,” […]

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Buying Versus Renting Part I: The Bird’s Eye View

When we become adults — no jokes please, wink, wink — one of the universal passage rites is deciding whether to buy a home or rent one. Adulthood conveys stability and security. The financial means to make such a large purchase and keep it long enough to establish valuable equity (equity is like magic financial pixie dust, but more on that much later).

It’s also the American Dream, so lots of emotional and psychological thingies work on us too, when we contemplate where and how we want to live long-term. What does our home base look like to us? How […]

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Spec Home or Custom Build? You Decide

If you plan to move to Florida from another state, or simply from one part of Florida to another, finding your new home can be a time-consuming exercise. Few of us make that decision quickly or lightly, so deciding whether to buy an existing new home — a “spec home” — or have one built to your specifications, is something worth pondering. But what if you don’t want to, or can’t take that kind of time? We’re here to help you decide whether a spec home or a custom new home may be right for you.
What’s a Spec Home?
It’s […]

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