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We’ve all got the bruises and the scars,” commercial real estate broker Randy Thibaut told the audience Thursday night at The News-Press Market Watch real estate symposium. “But I’m here to tell you, it’s time to start smiling again.”

That was the theme of the night at the annual event at Harborside Event Center in downtown Fort Myers, where real estate authorities take a look at the previous year’s trends and make predictions for the year ahead.

Thibaut — owner and founder of Land Solutions, which handles the sales and development of large parcels of land — was talking about a steady recovery in the new-home construction industry over the past year and a half.

“The gap between new home construction and resales is shrinking,” he said: $100-130 per square foot for a new home vs. $80-90 for an existing home.

It was the cheeriest Market Watch since the real estate market imploded at the beginning of 2006 at the height of a wave of speculation that drove the median price of a single-family resale to a record $322,300 in December 2005.

The median was $115,000 in January, according to Florida Realtors statistics — although the group debuted a new industry data.

“Greed, that was what drove our market” at the height of the boom, said Denny Grimes of Denny Grimes & Company at Royal Shell Real Estate.

Now, he said, the market is driven by confidence: prices are rising and 20,175 residences were sold in 2011: third best of all time next to 2009 and 2010.

The supply of unsold homes on the market shrank sharply, especially for the low end, Grimes said, noting that there are now only 683 single-family listings on the market compared to 4,220 two years ago.

Six years ago, as the boom was cresting, there were only 12.

Grimes drew applause when he said a tight market for homes would reignite the home-building industry.

“That’s good news, that’s going to put builders back to work again,” he said. “Our inventory is what it was a month before the peak.”

The only fly in the ointment is the difficulty buyers have getting financing, Grimes said. “If the appraisers don’t get you, the underwriter will.”’
Contract failures, caused largely by declined mortgage applications or by appraised values coming in below the negotiated price, were at 33 percent in November 2012, he said, compared to 9 percent in August 2010.

The third speaker of the night, commercial real estate broker Stan Stouder of CRE Consultants LLC, said thke past year was characterized by the strong influence of major events on the world scene.

“It was the year of the big,” he said, citing the S&P cut in the credit rating for U.S. national debt and the economic troubles in Europe.

But that was not all bad news, Stouder said: a $1 billion Chinese drywall settlement means $500 million in remediation efforts will be spent in Florida. It costs about $30,000 to clean the drywall out of a typical house, he said.

Going forward, Thibaut said, expect to see growth move north along Interstate 75 but probably not any farther to the east.

He also advised builders to look to the south, where rhe burgeoning economies of Latin America have produced a lot of people looking to invest or even relocate to Florida.

Those buyers have already transformed the Miami condo market, Thibaut said, and they’ll be looking to Southwest Florida as well.

“If I were a builder, I’d be learning to speak their language,” he said.

GULF COAST — According to data by national researcher CoreLogic, year-over-year January housing prices increased in the southern portion of the Gulf Coast while they continued to decline further north.
In its January Home Price Index report, the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area was the only market to increase prices on the Gulf Coast from last year. January home prices in that market, including distressed sales, increased by 7% from January 2011, and December prices increased by 2.4% compared with the same month in 2010. Excluding distressed sales, prices grew 4.4% in January and declined by .5% in December compared with a year ago.

CoreLogic reports that housing prices in Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, including distressed sales, declined by 1.4% in January and 7% in December compared with the same months a year ago. Excluding distressed sales, those numbers decrease, to a price decline of .1% in January and 1.1% in December compared with the previous year.

For the North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton area, home prices decreased by 1.6% in January and 6.4% in December compared with those months a year ago when distressed sales are included. When distressed sales are excluded, January sales show an increase of .9% over 2011 and December sales show a decline of 1.3% from December 2010.

Additionally, Florida is third out of the top five states with the largest declines of peak-to-current prices when including distressed transactions, behind Nevada and Arizona. California and Michigan are fourth and fifth, respectively.

CoreLogic, based in Santa Ana, Calif., has one of the largest databases for U.S. real estate in the country, and is a leading provider of consumer, financial and property information

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