Margaritaville madness: Want a Jimmy Buffett-inspired home? Prepare to camp out

If you want to be one of the first to buy a new home at the Latitude Margaritaville Hilton Head community coming to Hardeeville next year, there’s a decent chance you’ll have to show up early.

Several hundred people camped out overnight Monday when the first Jimmy Buffett-themed retirement community in Daytona Beach, Fla., began selling homes and lots, according to media reports and a news release from the Maragaritaville brand and development partner Minto Communities.

The Parrothead campers were awaiting an opportunity to secure one of nearly 400 homesites made available in the communities first phase. The Daytona Beach community is expected to eventually include about 6,900 homes with the first residents set to move in around April.

The Hardeeville project is following close on the heels of the progress at the Florida site.

The Latitude Margaritaville Hilton Head community planned for a roughly 2,700-acre site on U.S. 278 will include about 3,000 homes.

A sales center at the site is expected to be open by January or February with home sales starting a few weeks later, Bill Bullock, the senior vice president at Minto Communities, said earlier this month.

If the start of sales in Hardeeville unfolds the way it did in Daytona Beach, potential homebuyers here can expect quite the party.

The crowd awaiting the opening of the Florida sales center earlier this week were treated to an unofficial block party, complete with a steel drum band, stilt walkers, free food and drinks, games, and a screening of the movie “Jurassic World.”

“By the time the sales center officially opened on Monday, the crowd had grown to approximately 375,” according to a report from the Daytona Beach News-Journal. “The developers informed those arriving that if they wound up being too late to put a deposit on house lots in the first batch that their names would be placed on a ‘Paradise Priority List’ to be given the first crack when more lots become available.”

Model homes at Latitude Margaritaville Hilton Head are expected to be built by mid-2018 and the first residents will likely be to be able to move in by late next year.

This story was originally published November 16, 2017 at 11:00 AM with the headline "Margaritaville madness: Want a Jimmy Buffett-inspired home? Prepare to camp out."