A Greater Tampa Bay: Building the Fastest Growing City in America

By Jeff Musgrave and Nicole Musgrave

Take a ride around the fastest growing city in the Southeast with Jeff and Nicole Musgrave as they take you from cigars to startups in the Greater Tampa Bay area. Moving from the history of Tampa forward to the future, this book gives anyone interested in the area a powerful store of information on which to base investment and home-purchase deci

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeffrey Musgrave LLC
• Release date: Apr 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642551358

Jeff Musgrave

Licensed in 2010, Jeff Musgrave trained under one of the most successful real estate brokers in Central Florida, Stuart Hurry. Learning from someone who had sold over $1 billion in real estate gave Jeff invaluable experience and insight into the Tampa Bay market. After learning the ropes at the tail end of the worst market in US history, Jeff broke away from his mentor and began to make his own mark with Tampa Real Estate. In 2013, he was introduced to Nicole, an extremely ambitious chemist from Georgia who was brand new to the area. Within twelve months, Nicole was licensed, trained, and helping clients with great success. Since then, Jeff and Nicole have helped many agents become more successful through their proprietary system, "The Musgrave Method." Fast-forward five years and Jeff and Nicole are now married. They recently welcomed their first child, a son named Ari, to the family. As part of an unmatched network of honest, hardworking real estate professionals, they joined forces with CTV Capital in 2017 to head up their new construction division. Since the partnership, they have already launched two new communities and plan to break ground on over two hundred units by 2019. As if that hasn't kept them busy enough, in 2017 Jeff was accepted into a six-month business leadership program by Key Person of Influence, where he gained invaluable experience in scaling the business while maintaining ethical practices and client satisfaction. Upon graduation from the program, Jeff and Nicole began writing this book. They enjoy sharing their insights and firsthand knowledge of future development, transportation, and infrastructure projects currently positioning the Tampa Bay Area to become the hottest economy in the United States over the next twenty-four months.

Book preview

PART 1:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TAMPA

You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.

—MAYA ANGELOU

For thousands of years, indigenous tribes came and went along the Hillsborough River. Spanish explorers arrived in the 1500s but did not stay long or create any settlements, although they left a legacy of illness that ripped through the local tribes. The area lay uninhabited for centuries after. Thus, the modern history of Tampa really began in 1824, when Fort Brooke was founded along the banks of the Hillsborough, the river that now runs through the middle of present-day Tampa.

Fort Brooke attracted a small number of settlers to the area, but in 1848, a strong hurricane wiped out almost all of the prospering growth, and every building in Tampa was damaged or destroyed, including much of the Fort, which eventually had to be abandoned. Most of the residents stayed to rebuild the city, and Tampa was formally incorporated in 1855.

Tampa experienced slow and inconsistent growth during its early decades. Oddly enough, a lack of transportation was one of the contributing factors to this.

Phosphates (primarily used in the production of fertilizers) were discovered in Tampa in the 1880s, and this created numerous opportunities for the city. Business boomed in the mining and shipping industries, and Tampa’s present-day port is now the seventh largest in the United States. With over 50,000 acres of Hillsborough County dedicated to phosphate mining, Tampa Bay is still referred to as the Phosphate Capital of the World.

Beginning around the time of this discovery and continuing into the early 20th century, Tampa grew to an estimated 90,000 residents. A lot of this was thanks to Henry Plant and the railroad connector he created that extended to reach our new city. Although this railroad connector brought growth, Tampa did not reach a consistent, stable growth until the twenty-first century.

To this day, you can’t live in Tampa without knowing the name Henry B. Plant. Plant was a visionary who brought much commerce and industry to Tampa that stemmed from his plan for a large, connected railroad system spanning Florida. Plant began his dream by purchasing the bankrupt Atlantic & Gulf Railroad in 1877. Over the following decade, Plant purchased railroad companies with hundreds of miles of track, forming what was dubbed The Plant System.

Being connected put Tampa on the map, and Plant knew exactly what to do to capitalize on this. He began to purchase land and build hotels to accommodate the increasing number of visitors to the