On the Web, 
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.
Hardmoneyloans.org 6:14 pm on July 30, 2008 Permalink
How much is your home worth? Well, it all depends where you live.
The real estate market is still shaking. New data suggests that home prices have hit a new record low. In every new study that comes out, homeowners from Miami, to Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, have seen their home value go lower every time.
Is that disappointing? Of course it is.
Should we sell? Is not a good time.
Should we stick to it? Yes, if you can.
Have we hit bottom? Nobody knows.
Banks are facing their worst foreclosure crisis.
Don’t take me wrong, it’s good if you are in the market to buy a home for yourself or if you are an investor, but if you are not, and you own a home, most likely the value of your property is down at least 15 %.
Why do banks care if you are loosing your home? By having to sell repossessed homes, banks have to literally slash their prices down. It gets very costly for them, after all, they have to pay property taxes, maintenance costs, and whatever utilities that need to be paid, all of this expenses for a house that it’s just sitting there, vacant, and the bank is getting nothing in return.
The latest study by the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index of 20 cities, revealed the news that for 22 consecutive months home prices dropped. Only from April to May, 2009 the decline was of 0.9 %