Fort Walton Beach/Niceville/Valparaiso Good/Bad areas? (Hollywood, Eglin AFB: renting, insurance)

[zwtipp05]

My fiancee and I are relocating to the Eglin AFB area for my job and we're down here househunting.

One of the homes we may be interested in is near Lake Earl https://maps.google.com/maps?q=earl%...en&sa=N&tab=wl in Fort Walton Beach. Is this a good area?

We've also been looking in the Niceville area, but haven't found as much in our price range that we like. Any tips on areas to avoid would be nice as we certainly want to be in a safe neighborhood.

Thanks!

[beachmouse]

Lake Earl is part of the Elliot Point neighborhood of Ft. Walton Beach, and is generally pretty safe and nice. The park off Ferry Road is very popular and you're close to decent shopping and just across the bridge from the beach. Anything east of Eglin Parkway between the Santa Rosa Sound and the bayou there is generally good to okay. I would avoid the area that's west of Eglin Pkwy, South of Hollywood, east of Beal, and north of US 98 there- a couple pockets of not great, and if you're just coming in here, it's not worth the time to sort it out. Also avoid the Sylvania Heights neighborhood kind of north of Santa Rosa Mall, and a fair number of the streets just south of Racetrack Road.

One thing you will discover here is that it's perfectly common to have what passes for ghetto down here (and what isn't really close to big city ghetto, but still has drug and prostitution problems) will back up to a perfectly nice middle-upper middle class neighborhood without much of the trouble crossing property lines to the nice neighborhood.

Are you buying or renting? If you're buying, ask about flood zones and homeowner's insurance quotes. They will frequently more than make up for the generally affordable property tax situation in Okaloosa County.

And the better (east side) of Niceville-Bluewater can have pretty slim pickings below $250K, especially if you want a newer than 1984 kitchen set-up. Home prices south of I-10 in general are more expensive than they really should be because only about 5% of the land is in private hands.

[zwtipp05]

Thanks for the tips!

We're planning on buying due to our pets. We found a few places that looked promising when we went down there, so hopefully one of them pans out.