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With the more affordable prices and lower interest rates, showings and sales for homes priced at $300,000 or less have picked up over the past four or five months in Naples Florida.
“Certainly you can help a lot of people right now,” said Michael Sopka, a broker-associate for Amerivest Realty in North Naples, who found a home for DeMinico.
At 31, DeMinico longed to buy his first home and decided the time was right after watching prices fall. Though he’s only lived in the area a few years, he knew about the ups and downs of the market because his parents bought a home in Naples in 1989.
His home, which cost him about $207,000, is new and in a gated community with basketball and tennis courts, and a fitness center.
No one else has lived in the home. Like so many others investors, the original buyers purchased it in hopes of turning it around for a quick profit and then got caught with a home they didn’t want when the market soured. The home sat on the market for more than a year, DeMinico said.
“I got lucky,” he said. “They just wanted to unload it because they wanted to sell it. They couldn’t really rent it.”
His Realtor also worked with TIB bank to get him a loan that only required a $600 downpayment.
In south Lee County, deals can be found at such upscale golf communities as Bonita Bay and Pelican Landing.
A few weeks ago, Mary Catherine White, a Realtor at Amerivest, had floor duty. She got a call from a couple from Chicago looking to buy a retirement home in the area where they could spend part of the year. She took them out the day they arrived in town, and by the next day they had made an offer after finding a great deal on a two-bedroom condo at the Brooks, a gated community in Estero.
They got more than they wanted and paid $180,000, a price that even seemed to surprise White.
“Nobody can believe that we got something for that price in the Brooks,” she said.
The home was once listed at $369,000.
