Cape Coral · Fort Myers · Bonita · Naples · The Islands
Southwest Florida real estate, without the sales pitch.
Every listing in the MLS, tools that tell you the truth even when it is not what an agent wants you to hear, and two people who have been doing this here long enough to know which streets flood.
Work it out yourself
Tools that will tell you not to buy.
Most calculators on an agent's website are built to produce one answer. Ours are built to produce the right one. Run the numbers before you ring anybody, including us.
Rent or buy, honestly
Counts the tax, the insurance, the dues, the upkeep and what your deposit would have earned sitting in the market instead. It says rent when rent is right.
What a home actually costs
Payment, taxes after homestead, wind and flood insurance, dues and the reserve you should be keeping. The number that matters is never the mortgage payment.
What you would walk away with
Doc stamps, title, taxes prorated to the day, payoff and commission. The figure at the bottom of a closing statement, worked out before you list.
Insurance and flood, explained
What zone the property sits in, what that does to a premium, and the difference between a 1990 roof and a 2023 one on your bill.
What you can genuinely afford
Not the number a lender will approve. The one that leaves you able to run the air conditioning and take a holiday.
Storm, elevation and surge
Evacuation zone, base flood elevation and what actually happened on that street in 2022. We are not going to pretend Ian did not happen.
For renters
Nobody should buy because their landlord put the rent up.
Buying is not automatically better than renting. It is better under some conditions and worse under others, and the conditions are knowable. How long you will stay is the one that decides it, far more than the rate.
Put your actual rent and your actual savings in and see the year the lines cross. If they never cross, we will say so.
Compare my situationWhere people are actually buying
Every city, and what it really costs there.
Sales from the last ninety days, out of the MLS, updated with the site. Not a national estimate and not last year's figure.
If you are in one of these
Some situations are not a normal sale.
Each of these has its own rules, its own timetable and its own way of going wrong. We do a lot of all three.
You inherited a property
A court process, a personal representative, sometimes several siblings who want different things, and a house costing money while it waits. We will tell you what happens next before anybody mentions a listing.
Your listing did not sell
Homes that sold inside 30 days went for 3% under their first asking price. Ones that sat over 180 days went for 17.7% under. Here is what we would look at before putting it back on.
You own on the islands
Sanibel, Captiva, Fort Myers Beach and Bonita Beach are a buyers' market right now, with 19.4 months of inventory on Captiva. What that means if you are thinking of selling.
What clients wrote
In their own words, with their own numbers.
When we first decided to sell, we listed the property with another agent. Unfortunately, after 276 days on the market, the home still had not sold. That's when we were introduced to Martin Hawley and his team. The difference was i…
This home has been part of my family for a long time. My mom purchased the lot and built this home back in 2002. After her passing, making the decision to sell was not easy. From the beginning, they approached everything with a cl…
From the very beginning, Martin brought a clear plan, strong communication, and a level of professionalism that gave us confidence right away. Everything, from pricing to marketing to negotiation, felt intentional and well thought…
Who you would be dealing with
Martin and Kim Hawley.
We have sold houses in Lee and Collier through a boom, a hurricane and whatever this market is. Long enough to tell you when a price is wrong, which street floods, and when the honest advice is to wait.
There is no team of junior agents behind a call centre here. You get us.
The journal
Nine years of writing about this market.
Market updates for every city we cover, plus the things nobody tells you until it is too late to matter.