Nora Whitfield

Nora Whitfield has represented the lakefront and golf-course estates of Dr. Phillips for more than twenty years, and has known many of the houses for longer than that -- several she has now sold twice, once to a family moving in and once, a generation later, to the family moving on. Her particular interest is the 1920s and 1930s Mediterranean and Spanish-colonial houses that were built when this part of Orange County was still groves: barrel-tile roofs, loggias open to the lake breeze, plaster walls that have been patched by hand for eighty years. She has written about their restoration for two regional journals, and is often the person a new owner calls before they call an architect, to find out what the house was and what it wants to be again. Much of Nora's work now is with families in transition. She holds the Seniors Real Estate Specialist designation, and a good share of her year is spent helping longtime owners decide whether to restore, right-size, or pass a house to the next generation -- and then managing whichever of those it turns out to be, at the pace the family actually needs rather than the pace the market would prefer. That work rewards patience and a long memory. Nora keeps files on houses going back two decades: what was permitted, which additions were done well, where the water table sits on a given street, which trees are protected. When she takes a listing, that history becomes part of how the house is presented; when she represents a buyer, it becomes part of how they are protected. She came to real estate from historic preservation, and still sits on a local architectural review board. Her clients tend to be people who could sell a house themselves and have chosen not to -- who want someone who will tell them when a renovation has gone wrong, when an offer is worse than it looks, and when to simply wait. Nora lives in Dr. Phillips, two streets from Big Sand Lake, in a 1929 house she and her late husband restored over fifteen years and that she has no intention of leaving. For owners and buyers of the older estates on this side of Orlando -- and for the families deciding what comes next for them -- Nora Whitfield is a steady, knowledgeable hand.