Florida real estate crash means Tampa Bay homes are too cheap, report says

James Thorner, St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer , Jun 05, 2009

Tampa Bay area homes are too cheap. You read that right. According to IHS Global Insight, a economic forecasting company based in Lexington, Mass., our real estate is undervalued.

IHS took a measure of our depreciated home prices, population density, household income and historical attractiveness and insists our median home price of about $131,000 is 16.9 percent too low. Three years ago, when a typical home sold for $186,400, IHS deemed us 30 percent overvalued.

Florida's most stressed real estate region, Cape Coral-Fort Myers, was among the 10 most undervalued among 330 markets examined by IHS. Overvaluation remains a problem in places like the Pacific Northwest, south New Jersey and North Carolina