When the units were brand-new, Orange County Property Appraiser records indicate, they sold for about $20,000. An Orange County court records search shows that in the early 1980s, people started to foreclose on their units and some were subject to construction liens. Investors scooped them up and converted them to rentals. Foreclosure problems persisted through the 1990s, and as the number of owners to pay into the association declined, so did the services it could provide to residents. The pool turned green. Crime increased. Tymber Skan developed a reputation as a troubled community with an inefficient homeowners association and crime problems.
As Tymber Skan lore has it, hurricanes that hit central Florida in the mid-2000s were the first real nail in the community's coffin. Damaged units weren't repaired, and the shoddy construction of the condos meant that when one unit was damaged, the rot and mold and seepage infected the adjacent ones. According to a blog and Twitter feed that was kept up very briefly by a Tymber Skan resident named Joanne Porter, the clubhouse and pool were destroyed. Some people simply walked away from their units, leaving them to foreclose or simply crumble.
Then the economy took a dive, and it took Tymber Skan with it.
According to Frank Paul Barber, a court-appointed receiver who assumed the management of sections one and three in 2013 when the homeowners association for those sections could no longer keep up with the problems, things were dire when he took over. The unpaid utility bills were astronomical, he says, and there wasn't enough money coming into the association to keep things up. He says it was like "Beirut East" with all of its vacant structures.
"All the money went into just keeping things under control," he says. "There was never enough money to repair any buildings or do any common-area improvements. There were basically so many people in foreclosure, or who weren't paying or who abandoned their units, that there was just not enough."
Barber put together a plan for community revitalization that he submitted to the Orange County Board of County Commissioners, and it laid out a budget and rough framework to keep the lights on at Tymber Skan – at least temporarily.
He worked out a payment plan that allowed the community to gradually pay down its debt to OUC and keep up on new bills. Since so many units had squatters, he says, there was a lot of water usage. But squatters don't pay bills. And, unfortunately, he says, a lot of Tymber Skan's legitimate residents didn't pay them either.
"So all of the money went to pay for OUC," he says. "That water bill has been the villain ever since they stopped providing individual metered service. In all fairness to them, they didn't want their meter readers assaulted, [but] whatever I did with any money coming in was to pay the water bill."
Last year, a group of Tymber Skan property owners led by a man named Lorenzo Pinkston II, of a Poinciana-based real estate investing company called Pinkston Diversified, reorganized the Tymber Skan on the Lake Homeowners Association, as well as the associations for sections one and three of the Tymber Skan community. They petitioned the court to discharge Barber and turn the operations back over to the homeowners associations.
According to the court documents, Pinkston claimed that Barber had failed to keep up with his financial filings, mismanaged funds and fallen behind on paying OUC. "Pinkston requests this receivership be dismissed immediately following the filing of such reports," the court documents read. The request was granted, and on July 16, Barber filed his final report on the Tymber Skan situation:
"The properties began as one of the premier properties in the Orlando area and now may be considered one of the worst," Barber wrote. "The neglect of the buildings, the abandonment of units by owners, the investors who do not pay assessments, the decline of the economy at a critical time, the change in the Orlando Utilities Commission billing system, past boards of administration, and the continuing efforts by the County to demolish buildings and more items more numerous to mention have contributed to the state of the properties today. Going forward, without a major special assessment to make building repairs and legal expenses to gain ownership by the association of vacant lots for potential redevelopment, the property cannot be sustained."
