Published March 5th, 2008 by Mickey
Sluggish Housing Market Top Florida Story in 2007
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Florida couldn’t navigate out of its housing doldrums in 2007.
Around the state, a surplus of homes and condos built during an unprecedented housing boom left the market saturated and sluggish. Foreclosures climbed, lifting Florida to the No. 2 spot nationwide in the number of bad mortgages per capita by November.
The impact of the housing downturn in the last 12 months has been widespread: home owners, lenders, builders and furnishers have all felt the pinch. So too did state lawmakers, who in October slashed $1.1 billion in state spending to compensate for the slowdown.
For those reasons and more, the downturn in the housing market was selected as the No. 1 story for 2007 in a poll of Florida newspaper and broadcast editors.
“This past year has been sort of the ‘the morning after’ of the housing boom,” said Sean M. Snaith, director of the Institute of Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida.
By Anthony Mccartney, Associated Press Writer
Source: biz.yahoo.com