Leading Question

Actually, home prices may swell, some experts predict. Even before successive hurricanes walloped our region and state, we were running low on various building materials and workers, which helped increase housing prices. With months of repair and rebuilding ahead of us, the stress on labor and supplies will only be exacerbated. And those shortages will hike costs for new construction and, likely, existing homes.

"It's simply demand economics," says Ross McIntosh, a Collier County real estate development land broker.

Labor and supply shortages will affect the area well into next year, says Michael Reitmann, executive director of the Lee Building Industry Association. "We're going through some very trying times," he says.

Looking beyond, when we start returning to pre-Charley normalcy, the market should continue to grow, as it has for more than a decade. "I think home values will appreciate even more," Reitmann says.

One only need recall another notorious hurricane to see how such an event can ultimately lead to improvements, says Marla Martin, spokeswoman for the Florida Association of Realtors. "In the long term, you'll see results like we did with Andrew," Martin says of the 1992 storm that wiped out Homestead. "As devastating as he was, in the long term the effect helped."

Martin and others point to new building codes, resulting in higher-quality, more valuable homes that have replaced inferior structures, many of them mobile homes.

But McIntosh is holding back on absolute predictions that the housing market will bounce back. There are variables to consider, he says.

First, many people will leave the state because they have lost their homes and don't want to pay for or won't be able to afford replacement housing. Others will move because they're devastated emotionally and never want to endure another hurricane.

And if high out-migration negates in-migration, the market's not going to shoot back so quickly. "There will be lasting effects," McIntosh says.