Costs seem low, but you get what you pay for. There are a lot of million dollar homes here that do a good job of complying with hurricane code, but have absolutely terrible fit & finish- really bad paint jobs, cheapest possible interior doors and wire racks in closets instead of wood shelving, plastic trim, $20 lighting fixtures. We've hit Parade of Homes every year, and after seeing the impressively bad patch job on a 2x2 foot hole in the wall on a big Sandestin home, and the new house on Choctaw Bay in FWB where you could feel the living room floor was out of plumb just by walking across it, model homes with broken lighting fixtures, all kinds of obvious flaws like that, I've got a pretty short list of builders I'd trust down here.
Over all, I think Adams has slightly better build quality than a lot of the alleged custom luxury builders here. But it seems like all you've got to do is slap some granite counter tops in the kitchen, use a floor plan with a trophy bath, and have whatever flooring and paint color that's in fashion, and people pay insane prices for something where the quality isn't that great.
Another thing that drives prices up in Watercolor is that they've got much higher standards for fit & finish than other developments do- real solid core wood interior doors instead of plastic ones, better lighting fixtures, construction standards that require skilled craftsmen instead of day laborers, etc.
As for the temporary workers, anyone else notice that it seems like a lot more of the Eastern Europeans stayed the winter to work here instead of going back home? I'm wondering if we're starting to see something of a shift from the usual pattern of Bulgarian, Russian, and Polish college students who spent a couple summers in Florida to work on English skills and save up money for a down payment for an apartment back home when they graduated from college.