Housing pros upbeat at Market Watch (News-Press)

If you’re taking out a mortgage for a house in Lee County, you’d better act by December, real estate broker Denny Grimes said — last December.

That was his tongue-in-cheek advice for potential home buyers who may find 2011 will bring interest rate increases that could erase any savings from further home price declines.

Grimes, president of Denny Grimes & Co. at Royal Shell in Fort Myers, was one of the four speakers Tuesday at The News-Press Market Watch, an annual symposium on the state of real estate here and around the country.

He and the other speakers at Harborside Event Center in Fort Myers sounded a common theme: After taking a fall from the glory days of the boom, Southwest Florida is “bumping along the bottom” but the worst may be mainly over.

Especially for homes under $200,000, Grimes said, a likely rise in interest rates could effectively increase the cost of a house even if asking prices stay low.

Prices for low-end houses probably have fallen about as much as they can, he said, although there’s a backlog of expensive homes that likely will result in continued declines.

National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun predicted a 3.8 percent increase in gross domestic product in 2011, and said if businesses start spending in earnest that could jump to as much as 5 percent. Continued economic growth will eventually benefit the housing market nationally, he said.

Areas such as Fort Myers and Las Vegas, where the crash was especially severe, are close enough to equilibrium between supply and demand they may get a “surprise on the upside” as the economy turns around, Yun said.

But all four speakers mentioned the possibility a housing recovery could be derailed by larger events.

One of those events is the unrest sweeping the Middle East, said economist David Jones, a former Wall Street executive who lives on Sanibel and teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University.

He gave Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke an A-minus for stimulating the economy after the credit crisis but said those gains could be reversed by rising oil prices caused by uprisings in the Middle East.

“We will do damage to this economy if oil prices move much above $100 a barrel” for an extended period as happened in 2008, Jones said.

Real estate broker Stan Stouder, a founding partner with CB Richard Ellis, Fort Myers-Naples, said events starting to take place in larger real estate markets could have good effect here.

Although the sector’s been hard hit in recent years, “trophy properties” in major markets such as San Francisco, New York and Chicago are getting multiple offers, he said.

That, Stouder said, will drive investors to smaller markets such as Fort Myers-Cape Coral where better deals are available.

Commercial real estate broker Randy Thibaut, owner of Land Solutions in Fort Myers, attended the MarketWatch and said he’s seeing signs this area is close to better times.

“I think we have turned the corner,” said Thibaut, who specializes in brokering sales of large tracts of land. “I’m seeing early trends of significant land sales in Lee and Collier counties and there are more in the pipeline for this year.”

That’s significant because it’s the type of activity that must occur before construction resumes and the overall market recovers, he said.

The big players buying up land clearly believe that’s coming soon, Thibaut said. “They wouldn’t be buying if they were going to have to hold it for 15 years.”