You'll find Margate right in the heart of Broward County, just five miles inland from the Atlantic beaches, and very well situated to enjoy all that this stretch of Florida's Gold Coast has to offer. With delightful temperatures all year, pleasant Atlantic breezes, and more than 600 miles of white sandy beaches, it's hard to go wrong. You're looking at prime real estate!

Margate and Broward County

And Margate is prime real estate. Set aside the hype of hurricanes and the devastating yet anomalous summer of 2004. The myth of an endless cycle of devastating storms is just that. They do come, but wreck just as much damage along the southern Atlantic coast as they do to Florida. I'm recalling an uprooted 300-year-old oak tree at my sister's house in South Carolina, my own Old Town Alexandria (Virginia) bathed in feet of water, and New Jersey shore points as those late summer storms--periodically--pass through. For a light-hearted look at the topic, read Davy Barry's hurricane preparedness column, originally published in the Miami Herald.

Margate sits just below the Palm Beach County line about 10 miles north of Ft. Lauderdale. It's a sound investment. The county is bisected north/south by Interstate 95 and Route 1, and east/west by Interstate 75. The seventh fastest-growing in the nation in the 1990s, its population in 2000 totaled more than 1.6 million. The average age of Broward county residents was 38. Margate residents are marginally older (40) and slightly better educated.

While the median house value was pegged at about $115,000 the last census, that figure is somewhat outdated. The real estate market nationwide has boomed since then. Even if the bubble does pop--because eventually they always do--values rarely return to what they were. There are perhaps 23,000 residential dwellings in Margate, the vast majority of which are owner occupied. A more realistic range of selling prices for a single-family home might start at just below $100,000 and run to as much as $600,000. It's generally advisable to work with a local real estate agent.