When Maria Delgado bought a three-bedroom house in Cape Coral, Florida, in early 2022, her agent told her she was lucky to get it. Multiple offers had pushed the price $40,000 above asking. Three years later, comparable homes on her street are listed for less than she paid, and some have sat on the market for months. “I don’t regret buying my home,” she said, “but the number on Zillow is hard to look at.”
Delgado’s experience is now backed by federal data. Home prices in the Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro fell 9.1% over the 12 months ending in the fourth quarter of 2025, the steepest annual decline among the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index. Denver followed with a 2.2% drop, and Tampa posted a 2.1% decline.
Nationally, the FHFA’s purchase-only index still rose 3.1% year over year. That gap matters: these metros are not simply cooling. They are moving in the opposite direction of the broader market. Across the 50 largest U.S. metros, roughly half now show annual price declines, according to the FHFA’s downloadable summary tables. The list includes Austin, San Antonio, several mid-sized Florida markets, and a handful of Mountain West cities. It is a sharp reversal from the pandemic era, when nearly every major market posted double-digit gains in the same index.
Why Cape Coral’s Drop Stands Out
The FHFA index uses a repeat-sales methodology, tracking the same properties across multiple transactions sourced from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. That design filters out distortions caused when the mix of homes sold shifts from quarter to quarter, making it one of the most reliable public measures of true price movement…