Naples News
Homes resales are up nearly 120 percent year-to-date in the Fort Myers area.
From January to September, 12,526 single-family homes sold. In the same months last year, there were 5,727 sales, according to the Realtor Association of Greater Fort Myers and the Beach Inc.
In September, sales rose 56.7 percent. There were 1,185 homes sold. [...]

News Press
There were 1,610 mortgage foreclosure lawsuits filed in Lee County in September, down slightly from August’s 1,692 and sharply off the near-record 2,462 from September 2008, according to statistics released today by the Southwest Florida Real Estate Investors Association.
Foreclosures spiked sharply higher after the residential real estate boom in Southwest Florida ended in early [...]

BY DICK HOGAN  News Press
There were 31 single-family-home permits issued by unincorporated Lee County in September, down slightly from 34 in August and 32 in September 2008, according to statistics released today by the county Department of Community Development.
Sanibel and Fort Myers Beach reported no permits issued and there were 18 in Bonita Springs. Those [...]

News Press By Dick Hogan
There were 1,252 existing single-family homes sold in August in Lee County with the help of a Realtor, almost twice the 684 from a year earlier, according to statistics released today by the Florida Association of Realtors.
The median price of a house sold was $89,300, off 39 percent from the $146,900 [...]

Undeveloped property being sold at an up to 90 percent discount
That’s what the market looks like these days for undeveloped property in Southwest Florida – especially if it’s already zoned for development.
So far, it’s mainly investors on the buying end as a glut of unsold or foreclosed-on houses keeps down home prices, said Fort Myers-based [...]

Lennar Homes has identified about 400 homes with Chinese drywall that were delivered in Florida, mainly in its 2006 and 2007 fiscal years, the company announced this afternoon in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That represents 2.1 percent of the homes delivered in Florida and 0.5 percent nationally by the Miami-based builder.
The defective [...]

July 15: The Fed adopts a plan to curb shady mortgage practices. Lax lending standards during the heady days of the housing boom ended up burning the riskiest “sub-prime” borrowers—people with tarnished credit or low incomes—because they got loans they couldn’t afford or didn’t understand.
July 30: President Bush signs into law the Housing and Economic [...]

Foreclosure stripping is a crime, and it has a victim. It’s you.
Neighborhoods are losing more than just neighbors. Homeowners in foreclosure are ripping out bathtubs, wiring, countertops, sinks, windows, garage doors and even the palm trees from the front yard and selling them for cash.
As a result, property values are falling and the tax collections [...]

Southwest Florida’s real estate market is down, but it has been down before and will recover because of the area’s attractive lifestyle.  That was the message from experts at a town hall meeting held this evening by the University of Florida Friends and Alumni of Real Estate at the Islamorada Fish Co. restaurant at the [...]

The sign on the wall in my high school football locker room read, “Failing to Prepare, is Preparing to Fail.” Never has this been truer if you are considering buying a foreclosed property today. There are many pitfalls that can befall the novice foreclosure property buyer. Failing to prepare in this case can cost you [...]