Home Price Collapse
From last weekend's New York Times
Bill Spikowski, a city planning consultant in Fort Myers, said that because Lehigh Acres had so many parcels and few restrictions on what could be built, smaller companies battled for customers. From 2004 to the end of 2006, developers completed 13,183 units in Lehigh Acres — nearly doubling the total stock of 15,216 that existed in 2000, according to Lee County figures.
Residents remember the boom for its noise, with dump trucks lining the streets and power tools heard in nearly every neighborhood. Housing prices doubled, then tripled, and jobs were plentiful, nearly all of them tied to real estate.
Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in,” Mr. Elliott said.
Then in 2007, it all went quiet. Houses stopped
selling. Foreclosures multiplied. The median home price in the Fort
Myers area dropped to $215,200 in December 2007, from a peak of
$322,300 in December 2005. It had fallen to $106,900 two months ago. [emphasis added]
That is a 66.7% decline in home prices in three years. Shocking.
Those are the types of declines that signal the end of a bear market is near.
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- Read original article.
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