Lehigh Lots

Only about 2 years ago if you had bought a 1/4 acre lot here in Lehigh Acres, you may have only paid about 2-3,000 for it. If you bought approximately a year ago you may have paid $50,000 for the same lot. Now if you try to sell that lot, you may find that it's only worth about $25,000. What happened?

The market was booming up to about a year ago and prices for lots went sky high. Many people saw all the buying up of the properties and they themselves wanted to get in on the profits so many jumped into the market and became first time investors. The thought was the lots would continue to increase in price. I actually saw some people get equity loans on their home to be able to buy a lot or two. So again, what happened?

Very simply the market changed. It slowed way down. That in itself can have some impact on prices but even more so, at the same time everyone was becoming investors with homes. Home builders were building like crazy. It didn't slow down. The result- overbuilding, big time! This caused the market to react even more. Now if you have desperate people worried about losing money dropping their prices on these new homes, scared to death they wouldn't be able to get their investment back or worse lose everything, dropping these prices of these new homes. This in turn hurt the re-sale market because many people looked at the two and said they would rather have the new homes priced so low then purchase the resale homes. Now I know you get what that did to the resale homes- they in turn had to drop prices to be able to sell.

This is the mess we are in now. From Feb 1st through today there are over 2000 active listings in our MLS service and only 10% sale rate. This equals even more inventory and of course longer periods of time to sell. So now what?

Of course I like many real estate practitioners have an opinion. I believe we are looking at 2-3 years before our community can absorb its excess in inventory. In the mean time to be able to sell our listings, it takes stepping out of the box and finding ways to sell to people that wouldn't ordinarily be targets. That's why for instance the rent to own concept has become so popular. There are other great ideas also. If you check out our web site and click on ideas to sell your lot, maybe we can help you jump out of the box too and find the ways to still be successful in this slow market. www.aaarealtyllc.com