The News Press reports from Florida. "Expect Lee County's residential real estate market to stay in the doldrums for another three years, Orlando-based economist Hank Fishkind told (a) Conference in Fort Myers. As Florida's housing bubble deflates, he said, 'the shape of the bottom will be different' for each metropolitan area."

"Lee County likely will not see any significant further decreases in prices but will 'bump along the bottom' following this year's decline in home values, Fishkind said. 'I think it's going to be more L-shaped than U-shaped here.'"

"The problem, he said, is the county's huge inventory of unsold homes: about 14,000 houses, roughly five times what it was two years ago."

The Naples News. "'We’ll only have inventory because we don’t have the right price,' Fishkind said. said. 'Everything will sell at a price.'"

"At the peak of the real estate boom in Lee County, 20,000 residential units were under construction but there was demand for only 10,000, Fishkind said. Sales of existing homes in Lee County peaked around 4,500 homes per month in August 2005. During August 2006, 1,500 existing homes were sold in Lee, he said."

"'There was a huge speculative mountain of inventory generated,' Fishkind said. 'It will take until 2009 to work that inventory off.'"

"Condominium prices, however, are in for a decline, he said. 'Resale on condos is going down, down, down,' Fishkind said."

The Herald Tribune. "In the year before Neil Mohamed Husani engineered an eyebrow-raising deal to build a $125 million condominium tower opposite the Sarasota Quay, he became a master of flipping properties to partners at greatly inflated values."

"Just five years ago, Husani was so strapped for cash that he wrote bad checks, a crime he pleaded guilty to in circuit court in Manatee in 2002. The next year, he was placed on two years' probation after pleading guilty to stealing $14,000 in furniture from a vendor."

"For months, Southwest Florida's real estate community has been asking how Neil Mohamad Husani and his former partner, Michael Tringali, were able to buy properties for one price, get them appraised for more than twice as much a day or so later, and then use the high values to get whopping loans from area banks."

"Now that some of those loans are going bad, the new question on their minds is how one of the lenders, Fort Lauderdale-based BankAtlantic Bancorp, was able to get a property it bought from him appraised at a similarly high value and avoid taking losses that could besmirch its balance sheet."

"Rather than foreclosing, one of BankAltantic's subsidiaries bought Tringali's 1,143-acre property near Myakka City for $27.2 million, Manatee County court records show. Alan Levan, BankAtlantic's CEO, has said that the property was recently appraised again at about $28 million."

"Local real estate experts say that the recent $28 million appraisal is not realistic. 'How can that be a legitimate number?' asked Barbara Anson, an agent who has been selling land in the Myakka City area for 30 years. 'The legal and market value must be around $17 or $18 million. That's what it's worth.'"

"'At some point bank regulators will not allow the bank to keep property on its books at $27.9 million if it does not appraise out,' said analyst Richard X. Bove. 'When it is forced to mark the property to market, it will take a hit.'"

"Analysts and market watchers suggested that BankAtlantic might have bought Tringali's property through a subsidiary to avoid damage to its balance sheet. 'They don't want to look like idiots,' said George Huhn, who runs a Venice-based company that buys troubled loans from area banks. 'They're searching for a way out of this mess that doesn't involve taking a loss against earnings.'"

"But the biggest problem with the deal is the appraisal that BankAtlantic received on Tringali's former property, said veteran Sarasota appraiser Richard Bass. 'When something is sold three times in a year and the value more than doubles, you have to go 'whoa'. What was done to enhance the value of the property to make the value go up?'"