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

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (176677)	1/13/2009 11:48:39 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

YNH, what is the hurricane risk of the property? Any house in Florida, especially the gulf side, is under the risk of being damaged or destroyed in a hurricane, it is the risk you take to live there. It is a concrete block house as most are down there and the roof appears to be the correct pitch. Lee County has some pretty onerous roof codes. I doubt seriously if it has hurricane glass or hurricane shutters. As for surge, this one is close to a canal but far away from open water so it doesn't share the same risk that a high priced house on the water in that area would have. Everyone has a drainage ditch (not really a ditch more like a swale) in their front yard with the house placed on a slight rise, it's a water feature! I found dozens of houses around $50k in Cape Coral, some in much more populated and better areas in the SW and SE. In the better areas the houses are older and a lot have halfway finished upgrades. When I was there it was the height of the boom and the flipping activity was full bore. I imagine there was a serious dumpster squeeze because there were a couple on every block. I was only in the area for a short time, in order to sell my father's house. Cape Coral is definitely in the biz of housing retired people and housing snow birds on the cheap. It's a pretty pedestrian town where you can imagine lots of people whose only income is SS live out their years. My father was able to live there on his $900/month SS payments AND save money. I found it a bit on the boring side, but I have a hard time with flat places and all of Florida is flat. I met and liked my father's neighbors a lot. I can see why he chose to live out his last years there because it is quite possible for someone to live there in advanced age without assistance. He seemed to grow younger when he finally gave up the dirty NE city he lived in and moved down there. He was able to walk anywhere he wanted without worrying about getting bonked over the head or falling on ice, etc. what was a similar home selling for in 2005? $200-300k. My father bought his house which was certainly not as nice as this one, in a neighborhood which was largely empty for quite a few years, for around 39k in 1993 so the area has taken a complete round trip on these cookie cutter houses. Frankly I don't know how someone decides to live in one place over another because the houses are so similar from neighborhood to neighborhood. It seems the biggest determining factor for price is proximity to open water. Also, it seems like it is not unusual for lots to remain empty for a decade or more as each successive boom-bust works it's way through. So you could end up living in an empty neighborhood for a very long time. The city has stiff fines for not keeping your empty lot mowed but you can imagine that it is unsettling to live in an area with a lot of empty lots, mowed or unmowed.