Report: Florida’s real estate market will make a come-back

The Florida housing market has flattened and is expected to begin its recovery, a report released Monday by Attorneys’ Title Insurance Fund showed.

The 2008 Fund Real Estate Forecast shows every county in the Sunshine State experienced a slowdown last year. The markets flattened in spring 2007, before the subprime mortgage crisis in August knocked markets down an additional 10 percent statewide, the report says.

The forecast shows that Orlando continues to be the state’s strongest residential market due to the large number of fast-growing industries, including tourism, health care, education and defense manufacturing.

“Florida has a very large and powerful economy that has gone through a cyclical downshift, but it is still outperforming compared to the rest of the nation,” said economist Hank Fishkind, who created the report, in a news release. “The market has some indigestion now, but housing markets will return to normal during the next few years.”

Fishkind also said recent reductions in home prices come after an unsustainable peak, and that prices are still up considerably compared to 30 years ago. Although loose lending practices and subprime mortgages have caused problems, the state still has the highest level of homeownership ever, he said in the statement.

Orlando-based Attorneys’ Title Insurance Fund’s Consumer Education Campaign commissioned the forecast, which is also posted on www.myrealestatestory.com. Fishkind, of Orlando-based Fishkind & Associates, conducted the report using the fund’s online system of deed data for more than 30 Florida counties. The report provides a snapshot of the national economic outlook and 33 county-specific forecasts for 2008 through 2010, as well as a section showing how actual 2007 data compared to projections made in last year’s forecast.