Today we’re in the Bloomingdale Neighborhood of Manheim Township, an established suburban community in Lancaster County, PA with established landscaping everywhere you look. I “get down and dirty” with Andrew Landis of Showcase Landscape Services to discuss planting now, in late fall, for spring color.

Andrew brought along a bag of Tulip bulbs and the preferred hand tools for planting them. He talked about how to organize your plantings by color, type and locations within your yard. Since we’re having an unseasonably warm late fall, it’s still possible to get out there and do some digging while the temps are over 50 degrees. Andrew mentioned that you can get many bulbs planted in a half hour, so it’s not a big time commitment.

If you want to see a colorful landscape once spring springs in Lancaster County, take the time to “sow the seeds” of color before Christmas!

Read more at http://www.showcasegroup.biz or reach out to Andrew Landis at info@ showcasegroup.biz.

Today’s byline hit like a Tsunami across the real estate industry;

“Prudential Financial is ending a more than two decade foray into the residential real estate business with yesterday’s sale of its realty brokerage and relocation services unit to a Toronto-based company.”

Prudential Financial, an insurance driven company based out of Newark NJ, bought into the real estate market in 1987.  I guess time was up on that experiment.  What really amazes me is how little the Canadian company (Brookfield Residential Property Services) paid for the concern; a measly $110 million.  Wow.

The word spread quickly among Prudential Homesale Services Group and Prudential Lancaster Real Estate agents here in Lancaster County.  I saw a memo that said succinctly;

“Prudential Financial Inc’s sale of its real estate brokerage and relocation services should not have an immediate impact on companies that carry its brand”

Yeah, that helps a lot.  It’s like being tied to the railroad tracks and told that the train will be coming a bit later…you think.  I’ll wager that the Prudential name will be gone from Lancaster by summer.

In Central Pennsylvania, as with many “rust belt” regions in the U.S., a key component of the growth outlook for the next decade is going to be how urban redevelopment and remarketing is handled.

If you cast you eye across the area in PA from the Main Line out to Carlisle, you see a largely similar landscape of small cities (Lancaster, York, Lebanon, Reading and Harrisburg as examples) connected by a network of boroughs (Strasburg, Lititz, Millersville, Hummelstown, Camp Hill, Carlisle etc). In between are townships of suburban or rural character. With the economic malaise development of raw land in these last areas has become problematic from a profit/marketing standpoint, edging out all but the largest concerns.

For the next phase of growth that will bring small and mid-cap players into the mix, look to the first two categories – urban and borough level opportunities. The chatter about “second story development” in the cities and borough rezoning for economic opportunity areas has been ongoing in recent years, but I think we have not yet seen the municipal/business/developer cooperation truly needed to jumpstart this movement in real estate.

As a Mayor, I am opening lines of communication with our Lancaster County agencies to explore ways of creating a bundle of benefits we can offer prospective businesses in our downtown district. As a real estate professional, I’m looking explicitly at how we can cater to the free market to make our “product” – a vibrant borough with incentives to develop there – the most attractive in the area.

Regionally, this interplay of governmental/non-profit collaboration and the real estate sales/lease community is critical… we can’t work separately or worse, at cross-purposes. Catering to large developers isn’t the answer either – it’s the small business looking to grow who will be most open to expanding in urban areas and small class A spaces.

It’s my opinion that the counties of Central PA need to focus energy on their boroughs and cities very soon if they really want to see a turnaround in property values (and tax revenues). And it can’t happen soon enough.