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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Vosilla who wrote (127836)	6/9/2008 11:27:11 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

Aggressive pricing means houses are on the move again heraldtribune.com CAPE CORAL — In these relatively gloomy times for real estate, an astounding thing happened here in April, something everyone from homeowners to real estate agents to mortgage lenders have hungered for: an increase in home sales. Real estate agents and others credit fire-sale pricing by banks eager to get foreclosed properties off their books for the rapid rise in April sales when compared with a year ago. While not good news for the people whose former homes are being sold, it is a boon that buyers are finally arriving and eating into the large inventory that built up in Cape Coral's post-boom market, real estate agents and other observers say. Extreme pricing-to-move is a phenomenon that has taken root in the Sarasota-Bradenton and Charlotte County-North Port markets, albeit to a lesser degree. In April, combined sales rose by 5.3 percent. Cape Coral is much like Sarasota and Manatee counties: Real estate is king. A major roadway also separates the original downtown from an area that saw large amounts of new home construction during 2004-05. The divider is not Interstate 75 in Cape Coral, but Pine Island Road, which splits the city north-to-south. To the south is the old downtown, where in the 1950s people were flown in Cessnas over swampland being made livable by new canals while also raising the elevation of the land with the spoil. Buyers, many from Baltimore and other northern cities, would literally pick out their lots from the sky. To the north are new homes, many clustered together and painted in earth tones with pyramid-shaped roofs. Very few of them were there 10 years ago. When the bottom started falling out of the real estate market in 2005, Cape Coral was one of the first markets to be hit -- and hit hard. Values dropped, then dropped some more.