As they say, it’s all about location, location, and location. Take that real-estate mantra to the nth degree, and you have Teardowns.com, whose existence results from the surprisingly cost-effective concept of buying the property and doing an extreme remodeling on the dwelling:

Small, old houses in hot teardown towns have little chance of surviving after their long-term owners leave. The rooms in these homes may be too cramped and the ceilings too low. There’s no easy way to open up the kitchens and dining rooms to form the entertainment spaces popular today. There are no master suites, family rooms or home offices.

“The old houses just don’t have all the bells and whistles that home buyers want,” says Linda Ritter of Tiburon Homes, which redevelops about 10 to 12 properties a year in the Chicago suburbs.

“Most of the property value is in the dirt,” says Brad Crumpecker, of Xchange Properties in Dallas.

Am I right in thinking that this trend has been well-established in Florida? For at least the past 10 years, I’d see teardown construction every time I’d drive through the residential neighborhoods around Tampa Bay, particularly in St. Pete Beach and other beach communities. Lots of those areas consist of the original houses built there: Bungalows and 1950s-era cracker shacks. When new buyers come in and pay a couple of million dollars for the lots, the last thing they want is to live in a dilapidated hut. When you’re spending that kind of money, it’s a foregone conclusion that you’d invest in major reconstruction too.

So it looks like Florida was ahead of the curve on this trend, and it’s now spreading to other regions.