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

"It was the Best of Times, it was the Worst of Times", is the opening in Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities" and for the past five or six or seven or eight years in Lee County, Florida, we have lived both ends of the statement. Our local industry base is made up of agriculture, tourism, and construction, and for a time in the early parts of the 21st century, we were rolling on all cylinders. Watch out for cold weather that occasionaly meanders down, and the hurricanes that pop up between June and late November, and it is a perfect equaliateral triangle with the building boom that happened. Now local unemployment sits at about 14%, and many of seasonal and census jobs have disappeared and may amke that number "soft". Some startlying statistics recently provided by the reliable Lee County Development Council show in 2005, 8550 Lee County residents were unemployed (3.25%) and in April of 2010 35,398 of working residents (13%) were unemployed in a growing workforce. Diversify into other fields would help, however time and money do not seem to be available for any immediate relief.