BY DICK HOGAN
Originally posted on February 22, 2006
"If you want to sell before the market changes, you must have your home sold before September - last September."
That was the black-humor message to homeowners and real estate investors from residential real estate broker Denny Grimes on Tuesday night. Grimes spoke to a sold-out crowd of more than 1,400 at The News-Press MarketWatch at the Harborside Event Center.
A luncheon presentation today at Harborside, in downtown Fort Myers, also is sold out. "Welcome to the morning after!" Grimes said, likening recent declines in prices and sales to a hangover after a wild night on the town.
But like a real hangover, he said, the downturn won't last forever. Buyers haven't give up on this area even though the big run-ups in price of the past two years are over, Grimes said. They are simply turned off by high prices and scared by what he called the "irrational decline" of the past few months.
Here's what experts are saying about real estate in some specific areas of the county: CAPE CORAL "Cape Coral will have its own regional mall," D'Alessandro predicted.
The location will be along Pine Island Road between Chiquita Boulevard and Burnt Store Road on 200 acres put together by Cape real estate broker Greg Eagle. But the project is five to seven years away because zoning and road widening have to be taken care of first, D'Alessandro said. He also predicted strong growth in the part of downtown Cape Coral where the city is offering developers incentives to rejuvenate the area. "There's $800 million worth of development in the pipeline."
Michael Schneider- Christians, of Century 21 Sunbelt Realty in Cape Coral, noted that about 400 new listings appear every day for Cape properties, but only about 100 sales go pending. At the same time, there are about 600 price reductions per day. One waterfront home was reduced Monday from $1.2 million to $989,000, he said.
Speculators drove residential prices in 2005 far beyond where they could be sustained, Schneider-Christians said. "My personal opinion is that the next two years will definitely be a correction." BONITA SPRINGS/ESTERO D'Alessandro also said there's a concentration of retail development taking shape along Interstate 75 south of Alico Road: Gulf Coast Town Center mall at Alico and I-75; Miromar Outlets at I-75 and Corkscrew Road; Coconut Point Town Center on U.S. 41 south of Corkscrew; and International Design Center at Corkscrew and I-75. The design center, especially, will attract high-end home buyers from other markets because it will cater to architects and interior designers of luxury homes, he said.
But Bonita in the short run is exhibiting a surplus of office space, he said, noting that there is an 18 percent vacancy rate there despite relatively low rates in the rest of the county. LEHIGH ACRES The price of lots in Lehigh Acres has fallen off sharply in the past few months after being driven sky-high by speculation, Grimes said. But houses in Lehigh up to about $250,000 continue to sell because there's no competition in other parts of the county for homes that inexpensive, he said. COMMERCIAL For commercial real estate the picture was considerably brighter, said D'Alessandro, a commercial broker who also writes a column on real estate for The News-Press.
The commercial sector saw a huge increase in construction, he said: 2,143 units permitted in 2005 for a 78 percent increase over 2004. But there's plenty of demand to absorb that growth, he said, noting that vacancy rates were low across the board for commercial: 3.7 percent total with 2.8 percent for retail, 6.4 percent for office and 4 percent for industrial and flex space.
It isn't until vacancy rates hit about 10 percent, he said, that the traditional wisdom is for developers to "put the brakes on." Forecasting the future for commercial is difficult, he said, because there are so many factors involved - such as escalating prices for materials such as concrete and steel. "How do you forecast that?"
Still, D'Alessandro said there likely will be a cooling-off period of 18 months to two years while the rest of the nation's economy catches up with Southwest Florida's recent boom.
For residential real estate, the downward trend was clearer, although not an all-out disaster. "The buyers are sitting down and saying, 'Am I really willing to pay more than 30 percent more than last year considering the number of things I have to choose from?' " said Michael Timmerman, Naples-based managing director for Florida at Hanley Wood, a national company that collects and analyzes data for home builders.
"But is the sky falling?" he asked. "Absolutely not. The fundamentals are still there. It's a healthy change." He predicted that in the short run, suppliers of labor and materials will come down on their prices as demand for construction fades, and that will be a good thing for people looking to buy or build a house.
Source: The News-Press | 
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