11 minute read
AT A GLANCE
America turns 250 on July 4, 2026. That number, 250, is doing a lot of work in our office this week. It is the number we want to use to count what we love about working real estate in this small corner of America. We are not going to give you a literal list of 250 items (your day is too full and your scroll wheel will revolt around item 47). What we are going to give you is a love letter, organized into themed groupings, of the places, the people, the practice, the quirks, and the patterns that keep Kim and Martin Hawley showing up every morning in Southwest Florida. The 250th of America is a good week to write the kind of thing real estate agents almost never write. This is that thing.
The Places
Where we love eating, walking, and showing buyers around
First Street in the Fort Myers River District is the heart of everything we love about urban SWFL. The brick street under the royal palms. The Lodge for sports and brews. The Yuengling umbrellas in the afternoon. The Samuel Adams umbrellas at night. The live music spilling out of the doorways onto the sidewalk on a Friday in February when half the country is shoveling. It is the single place that, when an out-of-state buyer walks it for the first time, we watch their entire conception of "Florida" shift in real time. They came expecting strip malls and traffic. They got a walkable European-feeling waterfront with a 75-degree breeze and a band playing Springsteen covers two blocks from the river. That moment is one of our favorite parts of the job.
Jaycee Park in Cape Coral just reopened after the $18.7 million rebuild and it is genuinely amazing. New beach, new pavilions, new playground that the grandkids actually want to stay at, the same Caloosahatchee views that have always made it worth the drive. We wrote about Jaycee Park in our 6/17 Cape Coral Canals post but in person it is better than the photographs. If you have not been since the rebuild, go.
The Pageant of Light Parade in February is always a big hit. A 90-minute night parade down McGregor in honor of Thomas Edison, the inventor who wintered in Fort Myers, the floats lit up, the high school bands, the entire downtown energy. We bring buyers to it. We bring out-of-state family to it. We have stood at the same corner for years now and watched the floats roll by and watched newcomers turn to each other and say "we live here now."
Pulling up the boat on a deserted beach is the SWFL secret that no out-of-state brochure captures. Twenty minutes from the dock you can have a sandbar to yourself. No restaurant, no umbrella rental, no parking fee, no boardwalk. Just the boat, the sand, the cooler, the people who came with you. The fact that a working-class Cape Coral homeowner with a 24-foot center console can have that afternoon is one of the most American things we know. This is the country part of the country. The geography part of geography. We forget how lucky we are until a buyer from Cleveland reminds us in their thank-you note.
Pelican Preserve in Fort Myers is the showing we do when we want to watch a buyer's eyes light up. Amenity-rich is the phrase the marketing material uses. What the marketing material does not capture is the look on a 62-year-old retiree's face when they realize there is a town center with restaurants, a movie theater, a 27-hole championship golf course, a 38-acre nature preserve, indoor and outdoor pools, pickleball courts, a fitness center, and a calendar full of things that fills up before you get to write down half of them. We show the place to a lot of buyers. We have watched it sell itself many times. There is something quietly joyful about taking someone to a community where the answer to "but what is there to DO?" is "you could spend two years finding out."
Other places we love showing buyers, in no particular order:
The McGregor corridor in Fort Myers with its old-Florida tree canopy and the kind of mid-century homes that simply do not exist in newer Cape Coral
The historic district neighborhoods around the Edison and Ford winter estates
Bonita Bay with its eight golf courses, full marina, and waterfront restaurants
Pelican Landing with its private beach park access on Bonita Beach via the community boat
Old Naples between Fifth Avenue and the Gulf of America beach
Sanibel sunsets from the lighthouse
Captiva at sundown anywhere
The Buckingham area east of Fort Myers when buyers want acreage
Briarcliff for the same reasons
The food truck at the foot of the Cape Coral Bridge that has become a Cape Coral institution
Cape Coral Parkway between Del Prado and the bridge during a December evening
Alva on a Saturday afternoon when the riverfront acreage feels like a 1965 postcard
The Caloosahatchee from the Edison Bridge at sunset
Tin City in Naples on a tourist-empty September weekday
The Esplanade in Marco Island in November when the snowbirds are just starting to filter back
The People
Why we cannot imagine working real estate anywhere else
There is a phenomenon we have started calling the Boomerang Effect. People move away from SWFL for work or family or military service or just the conviction that "I need a change," and then a decade or two later, they come back. Not to visit. To retire. Jay and Pam are exactly that story. They lived here, they left, they came back, they bought a forever home with the people they always thought they would grow old near. We see this pattern enough now that it has stopped being a coincidence. SWFL is the place people leave and then realize, often slowly, that they cannot replicate anywhere else.
That pattern says something we think about a lot. The communities here have a gravitational quality. The people who built their first adult lives here keep getting pulled back. We love being the agents who help with the back-half of that arc. It is a different transaction from the first-time-buyer story. The Boomerang buyer knows what they want. They are buying with conviction. They are buying with people they love. They are buying with a kind of clarity that the 28-year-old version of themselves did not have when they first signed a mortgage in 1998.
Beyond the Boomerangs, the people we work with here are some of the most interesting human beings we have ever met. The Midwest engineer who retired to a Cape Coral canal house and now spends afternoons on his boat. The Boston attorney who downsized to a Naples condo and discovered she actually likes pickleball. The Toronto family with three young kids who decided the long winters were not for them and now run a small business out of a Lehigh Acres home with a pool. The 75-year-old widower from Buffalo who bought a small place in Estero so his daughter and grandkids would have somewhere to land at Christmas. The diversity of the people who choose SWFL is part of why we love showing up here every morning. Real estate in this market means meeting people from everywhere. We do not get bored.
The Practice
The parts of doing the work that make us love the work
The moments are the moments. The first walkthrough where a buyer stops in the middle of the kitchen, looks at their spouse, and we know we are about to write the offer. The seller who breaks down at the closing table because the house was their late mother's and they did not know they were going to feel what they are feeling. The four-day list-to-close on a quiet neighborhood off McGregor where the price came in $50,000 over appraised. The auction sale that hit $530,450 in eight days. The 32-day close that beat the 52-day neighborhood average and set the second-highest dollar-per-square-foot mark in six months in that community. We get to be part of moments that matter to people. That is not a small thing. We will never get tired of it.
The closings stand out, but the actual practice of real estate in SWFL has a hundred quieter pleasures. The thank-you notes. The "I wasn't sure what to expect" sentences that come out almost verbatim from sellers who turned out fine. The text messages that say "we got it." The umbrella moment at a closing in a downpour where you watch for the buyers' car and meet them with shelter. The phone call six months after a closing when the buyer says "thank you for not letting us overpay for the other one." The conversation across a kitchen island where you and Kim are walking a seller through their options and you can feel them lean forward because for the first time someone is actually explaining the math.
Things we love about the practice itself, listed quickly:
Walking a property for the first time and figuring out what kind of buyer is going to fall in love with it
The smell of coffee at the closing table at 9 AM on a Friday
Knowing the lender pipeline well enough to know which offer will actually close
Watching a first-time seller realize, halfway through the listing prep conversation, that they actually do have a plan
The handoff of keys
The phone call to a referral partner the day the contract goes effective
The drive home from a closing where Kim and Martin do not talk for the first five minutes because the day was full
The note-card from a kid (an actual kid) thanking us for finding the family their pool
The post-Ian rebuild closings where you can feel the whole community exhale
The probate closing where someone who has been carrying a hard year finally puts something down
The closing where the buyer and the seller end up exchanging phone numbers because they liked each other
The Quirks
Only in SWFL
Some of what we love about Southwest Florida is genuinely weird.
Lovebugs in May. Lovebugs again in September. You learn to wash the car at 7 PM.
Afternoon thunderstorms in summer that arrive at 3:15 PM like a Swiss train.
The feels-like-110 of an August afternoon followed by a perfect 78-degree evening with cicadas.
The fact that you can do a December morning showing in shorts.
The fact that you might do a January morning showing in a light fleece. Once.
The bridge clearance reality check for every out-of-state Gulf-access buyer.
The Cape Coral utility assessment status conversation, which always confuses out-of-state title companies.
Hurricanes in the news cycle and prep in the garage. The two things become routines.
The "snowbird parking" reality at every grocery store from December through April.
The reverse: an October Wednesday afternoon at Costco where the place is empty.
The boats on trailers parked on driveways across whole neighborhoods that read like a hardware store inventory.
The "no, the food truck is at the foot of the bridge" conversation we have weekly.
The Cape Coral street naming system, which alternates between Avenues, Places, Courts, and Boulevards and has confused more delivery drivers than anything else in human history.
The fact that an alligator could plausibly be in the retention pond behind the model home and the buyer is going to ask and the right answer is "yes, and we leave it alone."
The lanai pool screen enclosure and the engineering opinions thereof.
The fact that you can be at a Gulf of America beach at sunset 25 minutes after closing a deal in your office.
The Patterns
What we have learned, watching this market for many years
Patterns we love, because they reveal what is actually true about SWFL real estate over time.
The Boomerang Effect already mentioned. People come back.
The patience reward. Sellers who price right from day one and prepare the property properly continue to close on 2018-and-2019 timelines, even in 2026, even with the national-publisher headlines screaming crash. The patience is on the side of the prepared seller, not the panicked one.
The buyer who is genuinely ready always wins. Pre-approval letter in hand, lender who answers the phone, downpayment in the right account, the right team. That buyer wins against four cash offers a meaningful percentage of the time. We have seen it happen too many times to dismiss.
The "I wasn't sure what to expect" sentence shows up in three out of every four seller thank-you notes. First-time sellers, third-time sellers, sellers who have done this five times before, sellers in their 80s. The fear of selling is universal. The relief at the end is also universal. We have started writing it down because it is too consistent to ignore.
The community gravity. People who buy in Pelican Preserve or Bonita Bay or Old Naples or the historic district almost never sell to leave SWFL. They sell to move to a different SWFL community. The Boomerang holds even within the metro.
The "I should have done this five years ago" sentence. Said by every retiree we have closed for, regardless of when they actually bought.
The post-Ian honesty. Buyers who bought waterfront after Ian came in eyes open, asked the hard questions, and have stayed. The post-Ian SWFL buyer pool is more deliberate than the pre-Ian pool. We respect that.
What This Week Means
The 250th of America falls on a Saturday this year. The country will do its thing. The fireworks will fire. The grills will smoke. The flags will hang from every block in every neighborhood from Cape Coral to Naples to Bonita to Estero to Sanibel to Captiva to Marco Island.
Kim and Martin Hawley are going to do what we do every July 4 week. We will work. We will walk a buyer through a Cape Coral canal home on Wednesday. We will sit with a Pelican Preserve seller on Thursday and talk through their timeline. We will write a contract on Friday for a Bonita Springs family that is going to move down from Minnesota in October. We will go to the River District for fireworks Friday evening because Saturday will be too crowded. We will think about Jay and Pam, and about the family we sold a home to in 2014 who has since boomeranged a daughter and son-in-law back too. We will think about how lucky we are to be doing this work in this place at this moment.
That is, in essence, the love letter. The country is 250 years old this week. SWFL is a small corner of it. Real estate is the part of human life that maps the country onto a kitchen table, a closing statement, a set of keys. We are honored to be doing the mapping. Thanks for reading.
How We Can Help
If you are buying or selling anywhere in Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Naples, Bonita Springs, Estero, Lehigh Acres, Sanibel, Captiva, Marco Island, Alva, or Buckingham in 2026, send us a note. If you are a Boomerang who has been thinking about coming back, especially send us a note. We have helped a lot of people close that arc and we are very good at the back half of it.
Kim and Martin Hawley are Realtors with The Hawley Team at Keller Williams Fort Myers and the Islands.
The Hawley Team at Keller Williams Fort Myers and the Islands
(239) 420-9027 | martin@teamhawley.com | teamhawley.com
Disclosures
The names used as anchor examples in this post (Jay and Pam) are used with permission. All other client references are presented in aggregate or anonymized form.
Each Keller Williams office is independently owned and operated. Equal Housing Opportunity.
