Melanie Riddick and her husband Bill did not always have backgrounds in aviation real estate until they moved to the most interestingly named airpark in the country.
“Fly-in communities are not typically named after the city or town that they are in, for the most part and sometimes have unique names,” said Melanie Riddick. “My husband and I moved to Naked Lady Ranch Airport (64FA) in the fall of 2018, at which point he [became] passionate about aviation but did not have his pilot’s license.”
Morale-boosting art inspired the almost 50-home airpark in Stuart, Florida.
“Naked Lady Airport was named by the developer of this community, Clyde Dawson,” Riddick said. “Rumor has it he loved the nose art of World War II airplanes, so he dug out a lake here in the shape of a pinup girl. And I guess the whole thing was how often the pilots could say ‘naked lady’ over the radio. ‘I’ve got the naked lady in sight! Do you have the naked lady?”
Riddick notes that calls to change the community’s name over the past several years have always been rejected.
The Naked Lady Airport Community
The community of Naked Lady Airport has two runways: a 4,000-foot paved and lighted surface and a 2,000-foot turf strip. All homesites in Naked Lady sit on a minimum of a 5-acre lot, and most have direct taxiway access. Equestrian and cattle farms also surround some, and Naked Lady Ranch allows owners to keep livestock, with some even owning sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, and cows.
Riddick’s experience of searching for a hanger home on Florida’s coast led her to start a new career focus. Her passion for aviation has enabled her to understand what pilots want in a fly-in community.
A Passion for Aviation Real Estate
“How I got into the aviation real estate business was because I live at an airpark. And finding our airpark was extremely clunky and cumbersome, so that’s why I created AV8 Realty,” Riddick stated. “I have been in real estate for over 12 years and found that searching for airport property is very different from other properties. A lot of real estate agents don’t really understand how to market aviation real estate.”
Pilots are unique, so selling to them would be as well. Aviation real estate requires a specific approach to understanding the target market’s nuances and buying patterns.
“Aviators are mobile and most likely your buyer for these properties are probably not going to be local. So, that’s really where you have to focus to attract buyers,” Riddick shared. “Furthermore, understanding the covenants and restrictions is important as you don’t want to have a buyer purchase a piece of property and then be told that the aircraft they fly is restricted from the covenants.”
Knowledge Gaps in the Space
She also says there are knowledge gaps and that traditional real estate listing technology has yet to cater to these niche properties.
“You go to Zillow, and you type in ‘airport’ as a keyword,” Riddick explained. “But the problem is that it will show homes ten minutes from an airport, not necessarily on one. “Then you search for hangar and have to account for the incorrect spelling (‘hanger’) if those details even show in the listing. Only a small percentage of real estate is aviation real estate. Every state has a different percentage, with Florida being a prime state for fly-in communities.”
Thus, Riddick created AV8 Reality “So pilots can search for homes by what is more important to them.”
“The feedback I have received from Sun’ n Fun and EAA Airventure Oshkosh has been, ‘Finally, someone did this!'” Riddick concluded.
