William John Howey (1876–1938) was born in Odin, Illinois, and spent his early adulthood in insurance, real estate development and automobile manufacturing before turning to agriculture. After ventures in Oklahoma and Mexico, he arrived in Florida in the early 1910s and began selling citrus groves near what are now Dundee, Lake Hamilton and Star Lake. By 1914, Howey began purchasing vast tracts of land in Lake County for $5–$10 per acre, clearing and planting them with citrus. He sold them as developed groves for $800–$2,000 per acre. By 1920, he controlled nearly 60,000 acres in Lake County, making him one of the largest citrus developers in the state.
As Babe Prevatt recalled in a 1977 interview, Howey acquired thousands of acres from the Arbogast Land Company at astonishingly low prices and often didn’t pay for the land until after he sold and planted groves for northern investors. According to Prevatt, Howey risked almost none of his own money. Instead, he built a finely tuned sales machine that began in northern offices, especially in Chicago, where he had once lived and worked.
Wikipedia notes: “If the buyer purchased a maintenance contract, Howey guaranteed the investment plus interest within certain time constraints. In 1917, he opened the Bougainvillea Hotel to house potential investors, and in 1924 he replaced it with the Hotel Floridan on Little Lake Harris.”…