House Bonita

This posting has nothing to do with SQL Anywhere, unless you're looking for a really nice place to spend a working holiday, complete with high speed internet and a comfy workstation overlooking a canal.



House Bonita is a 2500 square foot, 4 bedroom, 3.5 bathroom house with lanai and heated pool on Woonsocket Canal in Cape Coral, Florida, available for weekly rental via VacationHit.com (click on "Cape Coral", then scroll down to "House Bonita").

It's only been on the rental market for one week, but already the months of February and March 2009 are booked, as well as part of December and most of April. Vacation rental houses in Cape Coral are a great bargain, much nicer and much cheaper than hotel rooms.



House Bonita is the result of a four-year search for a house in south-west Florida. The day Google Maps went live, I was working in Miami and used Google Maps to scroll across Florida from east to west, and then up the Gulf coast until I noticed a town with an unusual feature: hundreds of miles of canals providing water access to the Gulf of Mexico without requiring the purchase of actual shorefront property. That was Cape Coral, and that personal discovery marked the beginning of a search that has resulted in Bonita House.

Four years is a long time, but I had to wait for The Housing Bubble to come and go. Back in February of this year I posted Great Moments In History: Housing Bubble where I wrote that the bubble had finally burst (fifty-percent drops in asking prices kinda gave that away :)

Has the housing market hit bottom in Cape Coral? Maybe, maybe not, but by this fall prices had dropped far enough to qualify as "good deals". Especially the foreclosure properties... one that cost US$1,000,000 to build in 2004 sold for US$485,000 in 2008.

House Bonita wasn't a foreclosure, however, it was move-in ready. Complete with a dock and a 20,000 pound boatlift so you can park your sailboat or yacht... speaking of which, there are no bridges or other obstacles between House Bonita and the Gulf, and yes, manatee do swim in the canals.