A new book, Exiles in Eden: Life Aong the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession, offering an insiders view to the Florida housing crisis is hitting the shelves this week.
The Fort Myers area is prominently covered by author Paul Reyes including a look at a mostly abandoned, upscale gated community. A book about the housing bust would not be complete without an examination of Lehigh Acres, where the authors parents purchased a vacant lot in 1969 on the $10/month plan while honeymooning in Miami.
[more] →USA Today covers our local market in an article titled “Fort Myers has home bargains as market recovers from bubble.” The article cites market improvements of 121% for home sales from June 2008 to June 2009. The article also discusses is an 18% drop in homes sales in June 2010 and attributes this decrease to the end of the home-buyer tax credit, a lapse in the National Flood Insurance Program and concerns about the oil spill.
[more] →A recent NY Times article titled, Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting has resulted in several hundred very polarizing comments about this controversial issue. There appears to be very little common ground between the “moral obligation” and “self preservation” camps on this issue.
The article cites research that over 650,000 US households have not made a mortgage payment in over 18 months. Of these 650,000 households at least 18 months in arrears, 19 percent have yet to have any action taken against them by the lender to repossess the home.
[more] →One of the most succinct ways to summarize our real estate market in Southwest Florida is that right now it is a good time to be a buyer and a challenging time to be a seller.
A Forbes study ranks the Cape Coral-Fort Myers market at -8% for home-equity-to-home-value, the second worst in the nation. This current underwater position is a dramatic a shift from the 68% home-equity-to-home-value that Southwest Floridians enjoyed in 2006.
[more] →The opportunity to purchase a significantly discounted bank-owned property in Cape Coral is still available for those seeking a primary residence or second home. The majority of the Cape Coral foreclosure inventory consists of single-family homes. Both waterfront and off-water options are currently available.
[more] →The City of Cape Coral has implemented a program requiring a mortgagee initializing a foreclosure action to register with the city and maintain the property. The fee to register a property with the city is $150.
Properties in non-compliance are subject to fines of up to $1000 a day. This program has proven effective at forcing mortgagee’s to make improvements to foreclosed properties and keep them moving towards a sale.
[more] →Bank of America has foreclosed on the Related Group’s Oasis Condominium development in the Fort Myers River District. The $157M filing ranks as the second largest ever in Lee County. Jorge Perez and the team at Related Group had ambitious plans to bring a slice of South Beach to Fort Myers, but missed badly on the Oasis project.
[more] →Distressed property continues to dominate the real estate market here in the Fort Myers area with nearly 2/3 of our sales either foreclosures or short sales. If you missed the auction, here is a resource to view Fort Myers foreclosure listings.
[more] →In the last year, there have been relatively few luxury foreclosure transactions in the Fort Myers area. In fact, there were only two foreclosure transactions with a selling price over $1M.
[more] →Fort Myers MLS Map Search
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