ABC-7 reports that a German shepherd named Snoop is being trained to identify Chinese drywall. This innovative approach to identifying toxic drywall is great news for Southwest Florida. Snoop should be able to find the drywall even if it is just a sheet or two and not prevelant throughout the entire house.
I have another use for Snoop and that is to have him spend some 1 on 1 time with Realtors that are knowingly listing homes with Chinese drywall and not disclosing its presence. The Greater Fort Myers and the Beach Board of Realtors needs to step up and create and enforce specific rules about listings containing or suspected of containing Chinese drywall.
The Realtor Association of Fort Myers and the Beach released November 2009 home sales numbers which highlight significantly increased levels of activity in our market. These figures reinforce the sentiment of our team which has been extremely busy with second home buyers looking to take advantage of our reduced home prices.
Highlights from the November 2009 figures released by the Realtor board include:
An increase in homes sales over November 2008 of 70.5%
2009 YTD single-family home sales of 15,336 – up from 8,768 for all of 2008
November sales included 47.4% bank owned, 18.9% short sales and 33.7% conventional
MLS inventory of 6,976 homes down from 12,106 in November 2008
It is a great time to be a buyer in Southwest Florida, there are interesting opportunities across all housing types and price ranges. Use our map tool to start your search of every active listing in the Greater Fort Myers area.
The Naples News reports that single-family home re-sales in the Fort Myers area are up 120% for the first nine months of 2009 vs. the same period last year. In the January thru September period this year, 12,526 single-family homes were sold, up from 5,727 in the same period of 2008.
This dramatic increase in sales activity is putting a big dent in our inventory of available homes. Currently there are 6,809 single-family homes available in the MLS system, down from over 12, 000 in September of 2008.
Bank-owned properties are currently about half of the monthly sales, here is a resource to view available Fort Myers foreclosure listings.
How about a new way of segmenting the neighborhoods of Fort Myers?
Most real estate websites carve up a community by zip code or subdivision, this approach works well if you are familiar with the area and know which zip codes cover the the neighborhoods you are interested in.
Although we offer both zip code and subdivision searches, we want to provide you with another approach to learn about and search for Fort Myers Real Estate. To assist in your search we have created corridor pages for many of the main thoroughfares in Fort Myers. This approach should help in identifying additional communities to add to your sphere of interest.
Each of these corridor pages has links to the communities that are located along them. Listings can be viewed for the aggregate corridor or for the individual neighborhood or subdivision. We only display active listings (no contingent short sales), and update on a daily basis. Our team of buyer focused real estate professionals is ready to assist in your search.
There has recently been a great deal of euphoria regarding the real estate market here in Southwest Florida. A recent News-Press article titled Southwest Florida sees light at the end of housing tunnel cites recent home sales figures to suggest the worst is behind us.
While I agree that the clearing out of inventory at the very low-end of the market should be viewed as a tremendously positive sign, there are a couple of data points worthy of additional consideration. First, according to May 2009 statistics released by the Realtor Association of Greater Fort Myers and the Beach, 66% of the single-family homes sold in May were bank-owned. In April 2009, the figure was 65%.
Yes the banks are unloading distressed assets at fire sale prices, but who is buying them? Again statistics from the Realtor Association of Fort Myers and the Beach for May 2009 indicate that 64% of all single-family home transactions were cash deals. It is unlikely that a statistically significant portion of these cash transactions involved first time buyers truly absorbing our inventory.
As Tom Lindmark points out in a blog post about the Phoenix market, Is the Mini-Boom all about Investors? The rubber meets the road when these investor-owned homes hit the market as rentals. Are there enough quality, rent-paying tenants to insure that all of these purchases are cashflow positive investments? In my mind this is the key question that will be played out in our market over the next couple of quarters.
Yes, there are some interesting investment opportunities out there in the investory of Cape Coral foreclosures and Fort Myers foreclosures, just be cautious of anyone telling you that “the worst is over” or “we have passed the bottom.” I think that we need to see true job growth and more industry diversity before we can start making those types of claims about the housing market.
One of the things that often makes me cringe is reading the bios on other Realtor’s websites. Especially here in Southwest Florida, many open with “originally from________. It is fine to be from somewhere else, but just don’t tell us in your opening sentence. Others tout being a recent graduate of ABC School of Real Estate or better yet, just became a Realtor. There are probably not many customers that are seeking out a new entrant to the field to assist with such a significant transaction.
The New York Times recently profiled Valerie Haboush, the wordsmith to the Manhattan real estate stars. She has written bios, listing descriptions and even graduate school applications for Realtors in the New York market. I suspect Ms. Haboush would shudder if she spent much time reading the property descriptions that are marketing properties in our MLS system. It sure would be interesting to see how she might dress up a foreclosure that is missing appliances and has a mold issue!
According to stats recently released by the Greater Fort Myers and the Beach Board of Realtors, membership was down about 10% in 2009 vs 2008. Hard to argue that a culling of the herd isn’t a good thing when it comes to Lee County Realtor ranks.
Market stats recently released by the Greater Fort Myers and the Beach MLS substantiate what we are seeing in the trenches. Sales in December 2008 were up a whopping 181 percent over December 2007. In December, 1,034 homes sold, up from 367 a year ago.
Buyers are back in a big way and the market is screaming right now. Even though we are just 1/2 way through the month, we have had more closings in the last 2 weeks than any month in the last 3 years. The market is being driven by foreclosure and short sale listings and distressed property is dominating the Southwest Florida market right now. Banks are generally setting prices for below “regular” listings, which is leading to quick sales for REO properties.
The true challenge in this market is the uphill battle faced by good old regular sellers trying to market a home in this environment. If you own a piece of Southwest Florida property and don’t absolutely have to sell, now is a good time to be on the sidelines.
Great column by Chris Griffiths in the Naples News for home sellers about inspecting your MLS listing. Making a few key changes to the listing information can greatly improve your house’s chances of selling.
A stale, incomplete or inaccurate listing in the MLS system truly hurts your chances of sucess. Poor MLS listing photos, which are common on our market, are also a downer as chronicled in this video.
Key takeaways from the column:
Price your house based on current transaction activity, not what happened last year
Make sure your listing has multiple high-quality photos, a single poor quality photo doesn’t cut it
Have your agent add key attachments to the listing like disclosures, addendums, floor plans and condo docs
If you know your MLS number, you can review a summary of your Greater Fort Myers and the Beach MLS listing on our sister site.
Buyers in the drivers seat Buyers rule the day in the current real estate market here in Southwest Florida. The growing inventory has pushed all the leverage to the buyers side of the balance sheet. Just how big has the inventory of available property gotten here in Lee County?
For illustrations sake, let’s assume that you are interested in buying a home in Lee County. Also lets assume that you want to look at every property that is currently for sale and have a super-organized, GPS guided uber-agent that can show you a house every 15 minutes. How long would it take to see them all? Assuming a 16 hour day of viewing properties, it would take 282 days. That my friends is a buyers market.
The Lee County existing home resale market cooled in January, with the average sale price dropping from $322,300 in December to $287,200, a decrease of 10.9 percent. Sales volume was off 30 percent dropping from 1,084 to 751.
The question that remains unanswered is if this dramatic drop in January sales was impacted by the double counting issue that surfaced in early February. If in fact some sales in Lee County were being counted by both the Cape Coral and Ft. Myers Boards of Realtors, then previous numbers may have been incorrectly skewed upward for quite some time.
The inventory of unsold homes in Lee County is approaching 9,000, which equates to a nearly ten month supply based on 11,000 total sales in Lee County during 2005.
Collier County existing home resale prices were up 3.9 percent to $511,400 from $492,300 in December. Sales volume remained virtually the same with 264 in January and 266 in December.
Are Ft. Myers and Cape Coral MLS boards double reporting? One of the things that truly befuddles me is why both Ft. Myers and Cape Coral both need their own real estate boards. As the two organizations use different information systems and do not currently share data, a significant number of local Realtors belong to both organizations.
Many homes for sale in the area are entered into both systems. When the double entered homes are sold, both boards are most likely reporting the sale. This double reporting inflates the home sales that are reported each month by the Florida Association of Realtors. Heads up to astute RE/MAX Realtor Brett Ellis for uncovering this oversight.
Real estate numbers may be inflated by duplication [NBC-2]
In a world where customer-friendly graphical user interfaces and relational databases rule the day, the state of the SW Florida MLS systems are a disaster.
The various Realtor boards in the area remind me of medieval fiefdoms that seem to have forgotten their sense of purpose. They are in place to serve Realtors that fund them, not build empires at the expense of their members. The net-net is that members are forced to belong to multiple boards, enter data into multiple systems and learn how to use multiple systems.
Technology is going to fundamentally change this industry and significantly weaken the powers of these boards. Services like Trulia and Realtors like ZipRealty are coming to SW Florida. These services have slick interfaces that empower users to identify property on their own. As we have seen with self service gasoline, on-line shopping, on-line banking and many other industries, costs go down when consumers are empowered.
Maybe it is time for the big dogs of SW Florida real estate like Denny Grimes and Dave D’Alessandro to step up fix this mess.
Real estate anit-trust hearings A major showdown is underway in Washington pitting the traditional real estate practitioners dominated by the National Associaction of Realtors against the new web-savvy discount practitioners.
While I am not taking sides in this epic battle, in the end consumers will ultimately decide who the winners and losers are in this battle for the $60 billion pot of commission that is up for grabs each year.
Discount and non-traditional real estate firms vented their frustration and rage at the powerful National Association of Realtors yesterday at an all-day hearing held by federal antitrust regulators.
Many long-standing grievances bubbled to the surface as panelists representing new kinds of real estate businesses spoke about ways they said the trade group had blocked them from full participation in the market. Several derisively called the Realtors group a “club” that excludes members who won’t play by their rules, such as adherence to the traditional 6 percent commission charged on home sales.
Investors building high-end spec homes in luxury areas
A growing trend in the luxury vacation home sector is the spec building of second homes by investors. Many investors are focusing on the ultra-luxury communities like Boca Raton and Park City, Utah.
According to the National Association of Realtors, 13 percent of all homes – or 1.02 million – purchased in 2004 were vacation homes, up nearly 20 percent from 850,000 in 2003.
This trend is also common-place in Lee County on Sanibel and Captiva Islands. A quick review if the Lee County Property Records and current MLS listings for the newer high-end subdivisions on Sanibel like Butterknife, The Sanctuary and Beachview Country Club is quite revealing. Many of the newly constructed Sanibel luxury homes listed in MLS are vacant and owned by remote investors.
It will be interesting to see if this type of spec luxury building works for investors in Lee County. Unlike the overall housing, the market for high-end luxury homes in Lee County is soft where the current available inventory for homes over $1 million is 230% greater than a year ago.
This Is the Risk That Jack Took [NY Times] Second-Home Market Surges, Bigger Than Shown in Earlier Studies [National Association of Realtors]
