Gator Makes Selling A Home A Little Tougher For One Local Realtor

Although we live in an area with homes and businesses going up all around, the last few months have been a reminder to some, like Wesley Chapel resident & Realtor Nikki Spirakis, that the Wesley Chapel/New Tampa area is still flush with wildlife, leading to some interesting recent encounters.

When Wesley Chapel’s Nikki Spirakis was learning to become a Realtor, she thinks she might have missed the day they taught about dodging alligators while showing homes.

She could have used that training on March 29. Spirakis and a client were on their way to look at a home in Heritage Isles on Cross Creek Blvd. in New Tampa when they noticed an alligator approximately 6-feet long heading across the lawn and towards the front door of a house just two doors down from the one she was about to show.

“They didn’t cover that in real estate school,’’ she says.

Spirakis stopped her car to, naturally, take photos with her cell phone. The gator eventually made it to the front door and hunkered down. “It was like it was waiting for someone to open the door,’’ Spirakis says.

The gator hung out for a few minutes, then made its way back to the front of the house and moseyed towards the back of the house. While the houses on the other side of the street backed up to water, the alligator headed in the opposite direction towards nothing but dry land and more homes.

Nikki Spirakis

Spirakis, who works for Keller Williams, says she and some of the other neighbors weren’t quite sure what to do.

“We definitely discussed calling somebody, but I was like, this is Florida,’’ Spirakis said. “As it was walking off, everyone just figured we had our funny story for the day.”

Spirakis says her client, who had two young children along with her, wasn’t quite as fearless. While she hopped out of the car to take a look, she quickly hopped back in with her children.

They proceeded to the home Spirakis was showing, but the Realtor knew there would be no sale that day.

“She was wigged out,’’ Spirakis says, laughing. “She made sure the door was closed behind us when we went into the house.”

She did joke to one of her children that she would be a tasty morsel for the gator, but the trip around the home took less than five minutes.

That alligator was the first one she had ever seen in five years living in Florida, other than at Busch Gardens,’’ Spirakis says. “And, the house she was looking at backed up to water. We zoomed right through it and she was like, ‘I don’t like it. I can’t live in this neighborhood.’”

Spirakis says that none of the other Realtors she works with had ever experienced a gator squatter. Realtor Gail Beskid, who works with Spirakis, has said she is going to one day write a book about all her adventures during a decades long career as a real estate agent. While Spirakis’ recent encounter with hippie squatters  — “I could hear the music and smell the incense right away” — may not make Beskid’s book, her reptilian encounter surely will.

“Gail told me I definitely get a chapter for this one,’’ Spirakis says.

It wasn’t the first wildlife moment for Spirakis lately, either. A resident of the new Windsor at Meadow Pointe community off Meadow Pointe Blvd. at the eastern end of S.R. 56 in Wesley Chapel, Spirakis and her husband Erik Hajek recently encountered a cow that walked by their front yard after escaping from a nearby ranch off S.R. 56.

While the neighbors came out to watch the cow walk across the street, cowboys on horses showed up, eventually wrangling the animal and loading it into a trailer.

And, the day after Spirakis avoided the gator, a giant white owl perched itself on a fence about 10 feet away and watched her play tennis.

“I’m on quite a roll lately,’’ she joked.