Once again, Sarasota's Siesta Beach has been voted the best beach in the U.S. This time it was by TripAdvisor as part of their yearly Travelers' Choice Awards. With much of the U.S. getting slammed by winter storms, news about beaches and warm getaways are a hot topic and the story got a lot of news attention, even getting picked up by CNN and Huffington Post.

For those of us who live here, however, this is old hat. Every year Siesta Beach is always being picked as the best beach in the U.S. -- sometimes even the world. No, there was nothing surprising about the announcement for us. What is surprising, however, is the amount of property still available in Siesta Isles, a gorgeous subdivision of waterfront homes right next to Siesta Beach.

Siesta

If you want to live luxuriously, you'll be hard-pressed to find a better place to hang your chapeau than on Siesta Key. The 3.5 square mile island features the quartz crystal sands of the number-one beach in the country, plenty of incredible restaurants, and some of the loveliest vistas around. It's no wonder that the average listing price in the Siesta Key zip code is over $1.3 million.

When you're thinking about condominium living on Siesta Key, the question to ask yourself isn't so much where to find luxury -- it's how to choose which luxuries are most important to you.

Crystal Sands at 6300 Midnight Pass Road offers one-, two-, and three-bedroom villas and suites, two luxurious heated pools, and a perfect location on Crescent Beach. The covered

One of the things that I love about selling real estate in Sarasota is being able to spend time in luxury. I love to see the looks on people's faces when they first glimpse the view they'll get from their enormous hot tub, or that gleam in their eye when they scan the patterns in their new marble columns. Some may call it materialistic, but it is materialism at its finest, a great appreciation for all the finer things.

I'd like to share a glimpse of the luxury I get to revel in while I introduce people to their perfect home. This month, I want to talk about what I call “attainable luxury.” Basically that means that these are incredibly beautiful homes with more amenities than most Americans will ever see, but you weren't probably weren't named in

Considering the number of gated communities in the Sarasota area, I often get asked about the upsides and downsides to owning property in them. The most recent data on gated communities in the U.S. comes from the 2009 American Housing Survey for the United States, conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time, the survey estimated that 11% of residential communities were gated or secured, and approximately 57% had a special entry system. Since both of those numbers are probably a bit higher in Sarasota, I like my clients to know what to expect from a gated community when they’re shopping for a new home.

A Bit More Peace and Quiet
Gated communities are usually a bit off the beaten trail, and the