SW FL, Lee County Real Estate

Lately, all the real estate articles you read in our local papers are negative. We definitely have a slower market than we did 2 years ago. However, we do have a market here in Lee County, FL.

Every day, 60-90 homes go under contract. Some of the homes have been on the market several months.  Most that I see going under contact are newer listings. The new listings are selling because the seller prices them at the current market price.

Being a Realtor for almost 20 years in Lee County, I’ve seen the market go up/down and flat. In the early 90’s I had a buyer look at the same vacant condo 3 years in a row. The fourth year he wanted to look again, but it sold. That finally made him make the decision to buy.

The past 18 months has seen a slow down. Several things have contributed to our market changes.

Two bad hurricanes hit our area in 2004 & 2005 but more important were the hurricanes that hit other parts of Florida. The media coverage made in sound like Florida was wiped out.  Hurricane damage throughout Florida caused insurance cost to substantially increase.

The state & local governments have changed building codes to lower damage,but these changes added several thousand dollars to the cost on new homes.

The potential of all the baby boomers coming caused the large builders to move to our market & overbuild. The media reports hyped it up so investors from all over the world showed up and thus, we had an artificial demand.

All these changes in a couple of years have caused the investors to be sitting with many empty homes that they paid more for than they were worth. In many cases they are competing with large home builders that are willing to take write offs to move inventory.  The small individual investor is unable to compete. This caused the bottom to drop out of the rental market and resulted in many over priced listings.

Now you read about Realtors getting out of the business. In good times, everyone got into real estate and bought one or two properties. This was great if they bought in 2002 or 2003 and then flipped the properties in 2004 or 2005. Many of these Realtors now have lost many investment friends and money over lack of sales.

Our current inventory of over 18,000 homes and condos will not be reduced any time soon at our current absorbation rate of 500-600 a month.

It is still a good time to sell IF you price it right!  And, it is an excellent time to buy because of the huge selection and reasonable prices.

Bob Lewis Does Real Estate Right!

Call Bob!  239-565-0330

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 3:36 pm and is filed under General Real Estate Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.