12 minute read

AT A GLANCE

Six months in. Kim and Martin Hawley have closed a meaningful book of business across Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Estero, Lehigh Acres, Naples, and Sanibel in the first half of 2026, and the year is teaching us things we did not necessarily expect. Today's post is the honest halfway-mark recap. The deal of the year, so far. The hardest deal of the year, so far. The most touching deal of the year, so far. The surprise that buyers and sellers should both be paying attention to. The trend driving more inbound calls from out-of-state friends than we have ever seen at this point in a year. The pattern we did see coming but that has been more pronounced than expected. And what Kim and Martin are hoping happens between July 1 and December 31 to make a strong second half for everyone who is buying or selling SWFL real estate.

SWFL Real Estate at the Halfway Mark: What 2026 Has Taught Us So Far (Buyer and Seller Edition)

Published Tuesday, June 30, 2026  |  The Hawley Team at Keller Williams Fort Myers and the Islands

The Deal of the Year So Far: Sometimes the Home Is Not the Problem

By the time Tom and Linda called us, their Cape Coral home had been on the market for 276 days. Three price reductions. Started at $869,999. Dropped to $839,999 in June. Dropped again to $799,999 in August. Sat. By the end of December, the listing was terminated and the home came off the market with no buyer in sight.

This was not a tired house in a tired neighborhood. This was a fully renovated, Gulf-access waterfront home in one of Cape Coral's most desirable boating areas, with more than $150,000 in recent upgrades. New composite dock, tiki hut, 10,000-pound boat lift with a new canopy. Hurricane impact doors and windows. Roof replaced in 2020, AC in 2019, water heater in 2024. Entirely replumbed. Outside the flood zone. High and dry through every storm SWFL has seen.

The home was not the problem. The strategy was. The previous listing had been handled by an out-of-area agent who had completed only one transaction in the preceding twelve months. Stuck listings do not get unstuck by trying the same approach a little harder. They get unstuck by a fundamentally different approach.

The Hawley Team relisted Tom and Linda's home using our non-distressed seller auction format. Listing went live March 3. Auction closed March 11. Contract was executed March 12. Closed on March 26. From relisting to closed: 23 days. From auction live to under contract: 8 days. Sale price was the highest in the neighborhood in the previous 15 months. Tom and Linda wrote a letter to their neighbors recommending us and asked us to share it.

The lesson is the headline. Sometimes the home is not the problem. The strategy is. Days on market is almost always a marketing failure, not a property failure. If you have a great house sitting unsold, the right move is rarely another price drop. The right move is usually a different conversation about how the property is going to market.

The Hardest Deal of the Year So Far: When You Cannot See Through the Fog

Sara called us from Oahu. She had been sold an investment property in SWFL by an East Coast firm that did not actually understand the local market. The property they put her into sat in an upscale gated enclave that dropped into a neighborhood that would not have qualified for the gate, sat directly in the SWFL International Airport flight path, and came with a luxury country-club membership obligation that priced it out of half of its potential buyer pool. It was a country-club home built in the wrong neighborhood. It had already been on the market with another agent for 139 days. She had tried For Sale By Owner. The property was costing her $8,500 a month to carry while she lived 4,800 miles away.

We did not pretend the property's problems did not exist. We named them. Pre-listing inspection. Virtual staging. Broker opens, three public open houses on launch weekend, a wine-tasting open house. Direct outreach to every agent in our region who had recently sold in a similar gated luxury community. Tested creative financing including a no-money-down structured purchase. After two months of relentless work, we got Sara under contract at $665,000.

The deal almost broke a month before closing. Sara would have to bring more than $21,000 to the table to walk away. She was exhausted. She was 4,800 miles away. She was in the middle of a tropical storm cleanup in Hawaii. Martin got on Zoom with her and made a financial concession that was not required by our contract, because stopping the bleeding mattered more than winning an argument. She closed on May 11 by wire from Hawaii. The deal that nearly broke under its own weight ended with the relationship intact and Sara still in regular communication with our team.

The lesson. Local knowledge is not optional. A national investment firm with no boots on your local ground is selling a spreadsheet, not a strategy. If you are investing in a market you do not live in, your single most important hire is a local agent who knows where the invisible lines are drawn, before you sign the purchase contract, not after.

The Most Touching Deal of the Year So Far: Through Every Season

John and Beth came to us as an internet lead in December of 2022. They were in their late sixties, originally from West Virginia, living in a small two-bedroom Lehigh Acres condo and quietly looking at listings online. Martin called. The first conversation went nearly half an hour. Four years later, John and Beth have never bought from anyone else. We have been their realtors of record across three transactions, two hurricanes, the birth of their first great-grandchild, the hardest months of their lives, and a relocation that almost did not happen.

The first transaction closed June 5, 2023, a slightly larger condo in their community. We then listed their previous condo. The market softened. John was not yet ready to take a loss. The listing eventually expired with us. Most clients would have used that as an opening to find a different agent. John and Beth did not. They thanked us, took some time, let us know later when the home eventually sold with another agent at a different price. No blame. No villain. Just a lesson they absorbed and kept going.

For the next two and a half years, we stayed in monthly contact. Birthday cards in April every year. A congratulations card when their first great-grandchild was born. Check-in calls before and after every hurricane. A note at the holidays. Monthly home valuation reports, the same ones we send all our past clients, because the relationship continues after the closing. John signs every email "God Bless." Beth's voicemails almost always include "the Lord is good." Kim and Martin are Christians ourselves. That shared foundation was always underneath everything.

By late summer 2025, John and Beth were ready to buy again. A single-family home this time, three bedrooms, two baths, a garage, one floor, ideally without an HOA, in a higher-elevation Lehigh community. The reason was lovely. Their adult son was moving down from West Virginia to live with them and help care for them.

Then on November 4, 2025, the phone rang. Their son had been in a scooter accident. Cracked skull. His heart had stopped on the scene before he was revived. He was in surgery, then in a coma, on a ventilator, in an ICU twelve hundred miles away. John and Beth dropped everything and drove north.

For the next four months, the real estate search did not exist. There were just text messages, mostly with Beth, because John could not always bring himself to type. Day fourteen. Day nineteen with no movement. Surgery to relieve fluid pressure on the brain. Antibiotics in the brain itself. Failed shunts. Three pints of blood in one day. Christmas in the ICU. Every text Beth sent included a version of the same sentence: the Lord was the only One who could provide a miracle. We wrote back every time that we were continuing to pray for him. We meant it. We did.

There was a Wednesday in February of 2026, day one hundred or so since the accident, when Beth sent a message to say their son had opened his eyes that morning, smiled when she talked to him, moved his right arm well. He could not yet speak. But he was in there, awake, present, working back toward himself. That was a good day in our office.

In April 2026, the conversation came back, gently, to homes. The brief had changed in only one way. The single-story floor plan was now non-negotiable, because the son they were planning around had permanent brain trauma. The third bedroom was no longer going to be the caregiver's room. It was going to be where their son lived, full-time, with their full-time love.

We started showing again. They were tired in a way that is hard to describe. They were also extraordinarily clear about what they needed. The right home came up at $180,000. We put together an offer, got it under contract on May 14, and closed thirteen days later on May 27, 2026 in cash. Three bedrooms. Two bathrooms. One floor. A garage. The room their son will call his.

The lessons of John and Beth's four years with us are two. Choose a realtor for life, not for one transaction. The agent who is right for the rest of your life is the one who is still there in year four, year seven, year fifteen, when life has turned in directions nobody could have predicted on the day of closing. And the most meaningful work an agent does often happens between the transactions. The birthday cards. The hurricane check-ins. The text messages during the months their son was in the coma. None of that is on a closing statement. All of it is the relationship. If you hire an agent who only shows up when there is a commission on the line, you have hired a salesperson. If you hire one who shows up when there is no commission at all, you have a partner.

The Surprise of the Year (Part One): Builder Incentives Have Become Unbelievable

One of the genuine surprises of 2026 is how aggressive new construction has gotten with incentives. Buyers who have written off new builds as out of reach are leaving real money on the table.

A disabled veteran called us in April about an auction property in Whiskey Creek. The home would not have passed a VA inspection. Wrong property. But the right buyer was on the other end of the line. He was a hundred-percent disabled veteran living in a mobile home in LaBelle on a land lease. He needed to be closer to his VA medical appointments. His budget was under $325,000. He had been looking at small, dated condos in 55+ communities because he assumed that was the ceiling of what he could afford.

Kim asked him a question. "What if we looked at new construction?" He told her what most buyers tell her when she brings it up. He assumed new construction was out of his price range. She asked him for an hour to show him the math.

The math, condensed:

• The builder paid 100% of his buyer's-agent commission. Representation cost him zero out of pocket.

• The builder credited $20,248.73 toward his closing costs and lender fees, contingent on financing through the builder's preferred lender (which also happened to be the most reliable VA lender we know).

• He paid $305,000 for a brand-new three-bedroom, two-bath, three-car-garage Frontier model at Crane Landing.

• The same model now lists at $325,547 from the builder. Roughly $20,000 in instant equity, in his name, at closing.

• He walked away with $1,141.22 in his pocket at closing. Cash back. On a brand-new home. On a VA loan. In less than six weeks.

He had walked in thinking the ceiling was a small dated condo in Myerlee. He closed May 26, 2026 on a brand-new home with a three-car garage.

The Hawley Team lesson on new construction in 2026 is this. Builders are pricing aggressively and pairing it with closing-cost incentives that are unusually large by historical standards. The buyers who lose are the ones who walk into a builder's sales office alone without representation, because the builder's onsite salesperson does not work for them. The buyers who win are the ones who bring their own agent. The builder pays the agent commission either way. There is no out-of-pocket cost to the buyer for being represented. There is meaningful cost to the buyer for being unrepresented.

The Surprise of the Year (Part Two): Insurance Has Been a Non-Issue

Given the national finance-publisher coverage of Florida insurance (we wrote a full rebuttal on June 27 to the FinanceBuzz "10 cities will crash" piece), the most surprising thing about our actual H1 file inventory is this. We have not had a single deal in 2026 break or seriously stall on insurance. Quotes have come back in reasonable ranges. Carriers have been writing.

One specific data point worth sharing. We currently have a listing in an AE flood zone with a flood policy at $975 per year. That is genuinely surprising even to us. The 2024 and 2025 Florida statutory reforms (Senate Bill 2A, the Citizens depopulation program, AOB and one-way attorney-fees reforms) are working. The national doom narrative on Florida insurance is at least one cycle behind where the actual market is in 2026.

This does not mean insurance is no longer a real underwriting item. It does mean that the buyers who are skipping SWFL because of what they read about insurance in 2022 are operating on outdated information. Pull a current quote on a current candidate property before you write off Florida. We are watching the numbers in real time, and they are not what the headlines suggest.

The Trend We Did Not See Coming: Northern Buyers Calling About the Property Tax Amendment

The number of inbound calls and emails we are getting from out-of-state friends and clients in the Midwest and Northeast has gone up materially in the last 60 days. The driver is the constitutional amendment on the Florida ballot this November.

The fast version. On June 2, 2026, the Florida Legislature passed HJR 1F (House 75 to 26, Senate 30 to 9), placing a property tax constitutional amendment on the November 3, 2026 statewide ballot. The amendment is often referenced as "Save Our Homes From Excessive Property Taxes" and is officially on the ballot as the Homestead Tax Exemptions, Property Assessments, and Spending Restrictions Amendment. It needs 60% voter approval to take effect.

If passed, the amendment would raise the Florida homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027 and to $250,000 in 2028, applied against the non-school portion of property tax assessments. State analysis estimates the change would wipe out non-school property taxes for roughly 60% of homesteaded owners in Florida, with annual revenue reduction starting at $4.6 billion and growing toward $8.4 billion per year. The amendment does not apply to school-board ad valorem taxes, which would continue under current rules. And the amendment directs the Legislature to develop, through general law, a longer-range schedule for further homestead-tax elimination.

Whether the amendment passes or not is a voter question that we are not in the business of predicting. What we are seeing is the conversation. Out-of-state friends are calling. They want to know what the amendment would mean for the home they were already thinking about buying. They want to know how the timing works. They want to know whether to act before November or wait. The honest answer is that buying decisions should be made on the property fundamentals, not on a referendum that may or may not pass with 60% of the vote. A property that is the right property at the right price is the right property whether or not the amendment passes. A property that does not work without the amendment does not work with it either. But we are happy to walk every caller through the math both ways.

The Trend We Did See Coming: Assisted-Living-Driven Listings in 55+ Communities

We expected this one. It has been more pronounced than we expected. Several families have come to us this year because a parent has moved into assisted living and the 55+ condo or villa needs to be listed. We are working two of those right now at The Hideaway Country Club in Fort Myers.

• 5585 Trailwinds Drive #314 (Baltusrol Village). Ground-floor, three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,187 square feet, turnkey furnished, dedicated golf-cart space, currently listed at $198,900. Total annual recurring fees of $9,955. Built 1985.

• 5785 Trailwinds Drive #222 (Oakmont Village). Second-floor, three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,169 square feet, peaceful golf course views from the private screened balcony, listed at $175,000. Total annual recurring fees of $13,863. Built 1994.

Both are governed by the federal Housing for Older Persons exemption (55+ community). Both are part of the broader Hideaway Country Club community in Fort Myers. Both are real opportunities for a snowbird buyer or a part-time SWFL retiree who wants a low-maintenance, amenity-rich, golf-community footprint at a sub-$200,000 entry point.

The macro pattern is bigger than these two specific listings. The first wave of Baby Boomer SWFL buyers from the 1990s and early 2000s is now in their late 70s and 80s. Assisted living and downsizing are happening more often. The 55+ community resale inventory in the Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Bonita Springs, and Estero submarkets is growing as a result. This is a buying opportunity for the next generation of snowbirds and SWFL retirees. It is also a meaningful workflow for our team, who handle these listings with the same combination of practical and personal care that we bring to probate work.

What We Are Hoping Happens in the Second Half

Kim and Martin are watching two specific things between July 1 and December 31.

One: interest rate adjustments downward. A meaningful rate decrease in the second half of 2026 would unlock a category of buyer who has been sitting on the sidelines since the 2022 rate shock. The Fed has signaled a possible easing path. We are watching.

Two: the property tax amendment passing in November. A successful amendment vote would change the carrying-cost math for every Florida homesteaded owner in 2027 and beyond. It would also change the inbound call pattern from out-of-state friends from "thinking about it" to "let's go."

Either of these two events on its own would be a meaningful tailwind for SWFL real estate in the back half of 2026 and into 2027. Both of them happening at once would be the kind of tailwind that makes the next 18 months a generationally good window for buyers and sellers who are prepared. Kim and Martin would rather be prepared than caught flat-footed. We are betting on at least one of the two, and we are positioning our clients accordingly.

How We Can Help

If you are a buyer, a seller, or someone wondering whether 2026 is the year to make a move in SWFL, the conversation is free and the clarity is priceless. We have closed a meaningful book of business this year across new construction, auction, probate, investment, and traditional resale. We have seen the data, we have run the math, and we have the receipts. Send us a note.

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

Client names used in this post (Tom, Linda, Sara, John, Beth) are pseudonyms used to protect client privacy in published format. The disabled-veteran buyer at Crane Landing is referenced by first name with permission, with other identifying details simplified.

Specific deal numbers (commissions, closing credits, sale prices, listing prices) are presented as accurately as our records reflect for each transaction; specific tax, insurance, and HOA numbers for current listings are accurate as of June 30, 2026 and may change after publication.

The Florida property tax constitutional amendment on the November 3, 2026 ballot (HJR 1F) is a proposed amendment that requires 60% voter approval to take effect. No outcome is predicted in this post. Voters should refer to the official ballot language and the Florida Division of Elections at dos.fl.gov for the authoritative description of the amendment.

Each Keller Williams office is independently owned and operated. Equal Housing Opportunity.