The Party's Over
Excerpts from a NY Times Article...
FELLOW adventurers, refugees from winter and armchair archaeologists, we are here on this shiny green tour bus to embark on a safari of sorts.
We’ll be exploring the local habitat, as upended and reconfigured by an epochal real estate fiasco.
Yes, it has come to this in Cape Coral, a reluctant symbol for the excesses of the great American real estate bubble: foreclosed homes served up as tourist attraction.
The Mess is found in the glut of vacant commercial spaces; in the local unemployment rate...
now pushing 14 percent; and in the discarded furniture at curbside and the overgrown front lawns left by some of those relinquishing their homes to foreclosure.
THE MESS is the product of The Story, the fable that waterfront living beyond winter’s reach exerts such a powerful pull that it justifies almost any price for housing.
“We’re not in a recession,” says Bobby Mahan, an amiable broker here, describing conditions in the area. “We’re in a depression.”
Prices are now so low that inventory is moving. From the beginning of last year through October...
the Fort Myers metropolitan area had already had 14,000 sales of single-family homes — more than in all of 2007 and 2008 combined.
Roughly three-fourths of the deals were foreclosed homes and short sales, in which property sells for less than the bank is owed.
Yet about three-fourths of the buyers have been paying cash, an apparent indication that most are investors, not ordinary homeowners.
“That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence,” says Cape Coral’s newly elected mayor, John Sullivan.
“Where are they going to sell these properties? The party’s over.”
FELLOW adventurers, refugees from winter and armchair archaeologists, we are here on this shiny green tour bus to embark on a safari of sorts.
We’ll be exploring the local habitat, as upended and reconfigured by an epochal real estate fiasco.
Yes, it has come to this in Cape Coral, a reluctant symbol for the excesses of the great American real estate bubble: foreclosed homes served up as tourist attraction.
The Mess is found in the glut of vacant commercial spaces; in the local unemployment rate...
now pushing 14 percent; and in the discarded furniture at curbside and the overgrown front lawns left by some of those relinquishing their homes to foreclosure.
THE MESS is the product of The Story, the fable that waterfront living beyond winter’s reach exerts such a powerful pull that it justifies almost any price for housing.
“We’re not in a recession,” says Bobby Mahan, an amiable broker here, describing conditions in the area. “We’re in a depression.”
Prices are now so low that inventory is moving. From the beginning of last year through October...
the Fort Myers metropolitan area had already had 14,000 sales of single-family homes — more than in all of 2007 and 2008 combined.
Roughly three-fourths of the deals were foreclosed homes and short sales, in which property sells for less than the bank is owed.
Yet about three-fourths of the buyers have been paying cash, an apparent indication that most are investors, not ordinary homeowners.
“That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence,” says Cape Coral’s newly elected mayor, John Sullivan.
“Where are they going to sell these properties? The party’s over.”
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