The City of Port St. Lucie is cleaning up the streets of extraneous roadside signs. No more garage sale signs. No more team sign-up signs. And, now, no more open house signs. At least, not in the public rights-of-way.
Instead, such signs are being pushed back to private property and – for garage sales and open houses – notices are being posted to the city’s web pages set up specifically for the purpose of letting the public know about the events.
While the city created the open house listing web page with input from the real estate community, not everyone seems to be on board with the move.
“It will have an impact,” said John Falkenhagen of Lang Realty – and not a positive one.
Both he and Don Baetzold, of Keller Williams, questioned the need for removing open house signs. Baetzold said he could see limiting signs because having 20 on a street corner would look “trashy,” but that’s not typically the case.
The need, according to the city, arose from a U.S. Supreme Court decision that essentially determined governments could not regulate signs based on their content due to First Amendment protections. Basically, governments could allow all signs or no signs.
In September 2018, the City Council debated regulations based on the construction of the signs, but ultimately decided to just remove all non-government signs from public roadsides.
Residents and business owners, however, can still post temporary signage on their own properties, so long as the signs are not in the swales or the space between sidewalks and the road.
Several years ago, the city established a special web page for garage sale listings in an effort to help residents find such sales easily.
“It’s really, really popular,” said city spokeswoman Sarah Prohaska, who helped craft the open house web page, basing it on the garage sale site.
The online open house listings will be posted on a map so visitors can easily see where the open houses are. Also, the listings can include the advertised home’s vital statistics, including the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the square footage, the garage and whether or not there is a pool. Listings will appear on the website two weeks ahead of the open house and disappear from the list 24 hours following the open house.
The city averages more than 2,000 garage sale listings annually and the web page has had more than 72,000 page views, Prohaska said. She suspects the traffic could be similar for the open houses once word spreads that the open houses will be listed online.
But that’s an assumption that doesn’t seem to sit well with Falkenhagen and Baetzold.
“It could work,” Falkenhagen said of the city’s web page, but added that it would depend on the ease of posting a listing and the amount of promotion the city does for it. “A great number of people will have no clue” about open houses in the area just because they won’t know to check the web.
Baetzold said pushing open house advertising to the web was a too-restrictive a policy; he said many houses are sold directly from open houses, and those who do stop at an open house often do so because they saw a sign for it.
“No matter how much money we spend (to promote), it’ll be a reduced number of people looking at open houses,” Falkenhagen said.
Planning and Zoning Director Patti Toobin was tasked with working with stakeholders following the City Council’s decision to restrict temporary signs within the city. As part of her work, she met with real estate agents and Realtors at multiple meetings.
She said that the idea for the open house map came up at one of those meetings from a Realtor.
“Once the issue related to the Supreme Court’s decision on the Reed v. Gilbert case was discussed, I think they understood the predicament the city was in – basically all signs allowed in the rights-of-way or no signs in the rights-of-way,” Toobin said.
Baetzold still is not convinced that getting rid of open house signs is the best course of action.
“To curtail Realtors from trying to make a living and curtail sellers needing to sell is not only an economic mistake and somewhat an insult,” he said in an email to St. Lucie Voice.
“Let local trade be free. More governmental curtailment is not a good thing for something that is really not a big issue. Clean up the city should be the issue because it looks less than par (trashy) out there, that should be their main focus.”
To learn more about the rules regarding temporary signs, visit www.cityofpsl.com/signs.