by Mike Colpitts 
Holding out for a lower price on a home in Fort Myers and Cape Coral may just about be over, according to a new study on new home prices. Prices in many housing markets are beginning to level off, a new report from NewHomeSource indicates. The company tracks new home construction throughout the nation.
“New-home prices can come down for one of two reasons,” says Ali Wolf, chief economist for NewHomeSource: New home builders construct communities further away from city centers to get lower land prices to build on and builders slash prices in an effort to sell their inventory.
“If affordability gets stretched too much or consumer confidence weakens and buyer demand slows, home prices can come down as builders try to ‘find the market,'” Wolf says.
New Home Prices Drop
Zonda Home’s new home sales metric counts the number of new home sales each month and accounts for both cancellations and seasonality. The metric shows there were 689,834 new homes sold in June nationally on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate, representing a gain of 1.5% from last month, but a drop of 2.2% from a year ago. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, 58,848 homes were sold, 1.5% lower than last year and 5.3% above the same month in 2019.
The number of active new home developments in Fort Myers and the Cape Coral area has remained relatively stable over the past two years, at about 80 developments.
Cape Coral led the state of Florida in employment growth during 2024, but as more workers were forced to return to jobs in person unemployment in the community has risen to 3.7%, which is still historically very low.
Several markets have seen prices fall substantially from their peaks, opening the door for more affordable new home purchases, including Naples, which has experienced an average decline in new home pricing of nearly 22% in the last year. Cape Coral has seen new home prices come down an average of 14.2% in the last 12 months, according to the study.
Florida’s Price Declines
In 50 metros analyzed by Zonda, five of the top 10 markets with the biggest price drops were in Florida:
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- Jacksonville (-22.3%)
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- Naples (-21.9%)
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- North Port (-19.2%)
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- Cape Coral (-14.2%)
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- Miami (-13.7%)
New-home prices in San Francisco were 18.2% below their peak of approximately $1.2 million. It was also the lone market where April 2025 prices were below 2019 levels (down 15.1%).
Salt Lake City (-15.4%) and Austin (-14.2%), which had major booms like Fort Myers and Cape Coral in the pandemic, saw prices fall well below their peaks.
Bottom Line on Fort Myers and Naples
The declines in prices mean that markets that may have felt out of reach for would-be buyers are now more accessible. At the very least, these markets now come with better terms. Many new home builders in the Fort Myers area are offering discounts on their homes and other incentives like help with financing to reduce monthly mortgage payments.
For home shoppers who have been on the fence, now may be the time to revisit areas they were previously priced out of and take advantage of builder incentives by being represented by a buyer’s agent like Mike Colpitts to get as much as possible for your hard earned money.