Greg Snow - Southwest Florida Real Estate Expert provides real estate services to Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Sanibel and Captiva Islands

Our local lending industry is often more difficult to solve than many of the challenging games, puzzles or riddles one has encountered. My father use to almost finish the Sunday N.Y Times crossword puzzle in about 45 minutes. Today, in southwest Florida's mortgage market, closing a real estate deal with a mortgage normally takes more than 45 days. The Obama's administration's main mortgage assistance plan has as many people who have achieved permanent assistance as those who have tried and dropped out. The number of people who attend the foreclosure sales daily in Lee County has risen from 3-4 to over 100. Our local Multiple Listing Service has almost 1200 closed residental sales under $100k since 2010 with over 30% being REO's of foreclosures. Many of these sales are without loans when closed. Lee County is essentially pulling itself away from the "maddening crowd" of the opti-arm no documents loans that Wall Street helped fuel our place as a leader in foreclosures. Hopefully we are postioning ourselves to be the place to be in this decade.

.