Experts say Lee County Housing Market has hit bottom
Lee County fell from the dizzying heights of the boom harder than anywhere else in the country — but now it’s at least bottoming out while other metro areas continue to tumble.
That’s the picture painted by separate reports released yesterday by the private, nonprofit think tank Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., and RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif.-based company that tracks foreclosure data.
The findings:
• Brookings found that the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area was No. 1 in the degree to which its economy contracted since the real estate boom ended at the end of 2005: down 15.5 percent, worst of the top 100 metro areas. But the think tank also reported that from the first to the second quarter of this year, housing prices shrank only 0.7 percent, the best showing in the country.
• RealtyTrac reported that Cape Coral-Fort Myers was 33rd best in the country in foreclosure filings for August 2011 compared to August 2010: down 61 percent to 1,350. But the area was still 19th worst in percentage of homes receiving foreclosure filings: one per 266 households.
“We may have found a bottom albeit we’re prostate on it,” said Tom Wallace, president of Fort Myers-based Independent Development Services Corp., which helps businesses expand using a combination of private loans and Small Business Administration lending programs.
“To me it’s not getting any worse, but it’s still pretty fair awful.”
Wallace said the picture isn’t all stark. “We are seeing activity” and local business owners are still seeking loans, although it’s starting from a low point. “There’s a real reset button that’s been hit on wages and employment.”
It’s hard to sort through all the data on economic trends, but there are some signs that Lee County may be slowly returning to something approaching a normal housing market, said Randy Thibaut, president and CEO of Land Solutions — a real estate company that specializes in handling sales of large amounts of undeveloped land.
“We’re coming around second base but we’re not ready to go to home plate,” Thibaut said, but the glut of homes left over from the boom is being absorbed by the market — setting the stage for a modest revival in the housing market.
In two years, he said, Southwest Florida could be back to the normal housing market that existed before the 2003-05 construction frenzy: “not a crazy market, not a bubble market, but a market that could support itself.”
Source: Dick Hogan, News-press.com
Anonymous comments are disabled