A three-bedroom ranch in Cape Coral, Florida, that would have drawn a dozen offers over a single weekend in 2022 now sits on the market for six weeks before a buyer bothers to schedule a showing. When someone finally bites, the closing price often lands well below what the seller paid during the pandemic frenzy. The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s repeat-sale price index for the Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro area puts a hard number on the pain: home values peaked in early 2023 and have since fallen roughly 9% through the Q4 2025 reading, a decline steep enough to stand out even among other cooling Florida markets.
“I had a listing last month that would have sold in 48 hours three years ago,” says Maria Delgado, a Realtor with Keller Williams in Cape Coral who has worked the Lee County market for 14 years. “We ended up cutting the price twice and still had to offer a credit at closing. That is the new normal here.”
Meanwhile, in cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cleveland, buyers face the opposite problem. There simply are not enough homes to go around. National inventory figures from the National Association of Realtors show that many Midwest and Northeast metros have been running at fewer than three months of supply, a level that routinely triggers bidding wars. The result is a widening fracture in American housing: parts of the Sun Belt are giving back pandemic-era gains while older industrial cities cannot build or list fast enough to keep up with demand.
Cape Coral’s correction, by the numbers
The FHFA index is one of the most reliable gauges of home-price movement in any U.S. metro. It tracks repeat sales of the same properties financed with conforming mortgages, so it does not rely on listing estimates or algorithmic guesses. For Cape Coral-Fort Myers, the index surged more than 60% between early 2020 and its first-quarter 2023 peak, then reversed. By the Q4 2025 reading, the most recent available as of spring 2026, the cumulative retreat had reached approximately 9%, a pace of erosion that few other Florida metros have matched…