A little more than a year after moving to Estero, Michael Burke has decided to sell his lucrative computer hardware company in Mentor, Ohio, along with its marketing offices in New York, Los Angeles and Washington. He’s trading in his old life for a real estate license.

“I’m just going where the money is and what excites me,” said Burke, a 43-year-old whose business minor from Kent State University was the only training he brought to his new trade. “It’s a gamble. You’re playing the odds.”

But the rapid success of his personal investments has made the south Lee County real estate market look like a sure bet.

Here’s just one example: Burke signed a contract to buy a three-bedroom, three-bathroom home in the Grandezza gated community off Ben Hill Griffin Parkway at the preconstruction price of $536,000. The home isn’t finished yet and Burke hasn’t closed on the property, but he already has it listed for sale for $799,000.

In case you haven’t noticed, Lee County, like much of the country, is swept up in a real estate craze. The median sales price of existing homes in July soared to $287,500, a 44 percent jump compared with the same month last year. The only area in Florida with a faster appreciation rate that month was Orlando, according to the Florida Association of Realtors.

Nationwide, the National Association of Realtors said Lee County ranked second, behind only the Phoenix area, in home appreciation in the second quarter of 2005.

Even if the white-hot pace of real estate investment cools off tomorrow — which, some experts warn, is a real possibility — it will have left an indelible imprint on the landscape and culture of Lee County.

In less than two years, the boom has:

— Changed the look of whole communities. The value of permits for new single-family homes hit $3.1 billion in Lee County for the first eight months of this year, surpassing last year’s 12-month record of $3 billion. Gated communities now cover about 60 percent of Bonita Springs’ landscape. The city’s population is expected to swell 40 percent in the next eight years, from 41,070 to 57,300. Meanwhile, orange groves, sand mines and cow pastures in eastern Estero are turning into swanky housing developments; the community is projected to grow by more than 20,000 in that same period.

— Redefined the meaning of “affordable.” The rich are displacing the poor and the middle class. In San Carlos Park, once a haven for the working class, you are more than five times more likely to find a home priced at $500,000 and above than for $200,000 and below. Builders complain about the lack of skilled laborers but continue to construct homes out of the price range of their workers.

— Made millionaires out of many but left others behind. With some notable exceptions, that division breaks along racial and ethnic lines. Hispanics, in particular, are much less likely to own their own homes than whites. Although Hispanics make up just 16 percent of Lee’s population, a Bonita-based affordable housing developer estimates that 40 percent of its clientele are of Hispanic origin.

— Transformed neighborhoods into mini-stock exchanges. Investors are cashing out quickly and moving their money to the next “flip,” “spec” or “fixer-upper.” Between July 2004 and July 2005, some 509 homes and condominiums sold twice in Bonita Springs, Estero and San Carlos Park, with an average profit of $67,072 between sales, a Bonita Daily News analysis of Lee County Property Appraiser records shows. Rampant speculation is deepening fears that a real estate bubble has settled in Lee County and could burst without notice.

— Become the talk of the town. From the stands surrounding Little League baseball fields to the line at the supermarket to the company breakroom, tales of buying and selling, of remodeling and refinancing, are inescapable. Everyone, it seems, knows someone who bought a two-bedroom in Bonita Springs in the 1990s for $125,000 that has quadrupled in value. Everyone, it also seems, wants a share of the fortune that awaits, literally, at every corner.

“Real estate investing has become vogue,” said Mark Mathosian, financial administrator for the FBI investigation department in Fort Myers. “You don’t really hear a lot of horror stories, and that’s one of the problems. You don’t hear about the guy who bought the townhouse in Bonita and couldn’t sell it. We’ve been in an up-direction market for so long, people just assume there’s no downside.”

High risk, high reward

Watching his 15-year-old son play in a soccer match at Spring Creek Elementary on a recent evening, Alain Hughes, 39, explained his buying strategy. For the time being, he rents at The Tides at Pelican Landing, an apartment complex that recently bowed to one of the area’s hottest trends and turned into condominiums.

“You just need enough money for the down payment. That’s the key to picking where you’re going to buy,” Hughes said, adding that he wants to buy in Bonita or Estero, not Naples, because “the farther south you go, the more expensive it is.”

Hughes, the manager of a North Naples furniture store, said the most he wants to pay is $300,000, an increasingly difficult prospect in south Lee. But Hughes was confident.

“It’s such a fast-moving market. The best thing to do is to find a Realtor to pay attention to everything every day because once something comes up, it’s not up for long,” he said.

These days, the Multiple Listing Service is more frequently read than Standard & Poor’s 500. The national obsession with real estate goes back about five years to two separate but simultaneous occurrences, local real estate experts say.

The federal interest rate dropped to historic lows, and lenders launched a new type of loan program that allowed borrowers to pay only interest for a fixed amount of time, usually five years or so. With an interest-only loan, the monthly mortgage payment on a $300,000 home shrank to $1,344, more than $400 less than a payment on a 30-year fixed-rate loan.

“This is as hot a market as I’ve seen in 30 years,” said Gregory Hallam, group vice president of First Florida Bank in Naples. “Money is readily available.”

Interest-only loans made up 42.4 percent of loans for home purchases in the Naples area in 2004, a significantly higher percentage than the national average of 30.9 percent, according to mortgage tracker LoanPerformance. That’s a troubling trend, Hallam said.

“What you’re doing there is just letting people gamble on the appreciation. I think it’s risky. Everyone just assumes property values will only go up, but they can go down,” he said.

And interest-only loans only make sense if your home appreciates at a faster rate than your debt collects, said Ross McIntosh, a Naples land broker.

“You’re paying 6 or 7 percent (in interest), but if your house isn’t escalating at 6 or 7 percent, you’re going backward,” he said.

So far, the tack is working for Burke.

He bought the house he lives in, also in Grandezza, with an interest-only loan. Although he only signed the purchase contract a year ago and moved in two weeks ago, Burke thinks the home’s price has ballooned from $565,000 to well more than $800,000. He plans to sell the house in less than two years.

In all, his cache of properties has grown to five across Bonita Springs and Estero.

“I’m just going to ride the appreciation train,” he said.

Lee County’s appeal

Everyone wants sunshine and water. So goes the explanation behind buyers’ long-held intoxication with Florida property.

Why has Lee County’s real estate market — and south Lee County, in particular — been hotter than the rest of the state? Any broker will tell you that the answer, of course, is location, location, location.

Brokers cite the new Midfield Terminal at Southwest Florida International Airport and the expansion of Florida Gulf Coast University as Lee County’s biggest draws. The county is relatively immune from a bust, the theory goes, because the baby boom generation is reaching retirement age and looking to Southwest Florida to invest in a second home.

Real estate sales have been brisk in south Lee for several years, but the market really took off in the middle of 2004, said Bill Barnes, managing broker of Coldwell Banker residential for the Estero and Fort Myers market. As seasonal residents packed up for points northward after Easter, Barnes and other market watchers expected sales to decline as they always did that time of year.

“But in June and July, it stayed really strong,” he said.

In August, Hurricane Charley delivered a small shock to the market, but the pace quickly picked up. First, Naples prices soared. Then Bonita. Then Estero. Then San Carlos Park.

“What was available in Bonita probably got sucked up in 90 days. It was a real estate tsunami heading north,” Barnes said. About two months ago, he put his own house in Naples on the market at $375,000 and got three calls for above the listing price within 24 hours.

Across Lee County, land is changing hands at lightning pace. The Lee County Property Appraisers office processed 90,000 transactions in 2003, 131,000 in 2004 and is expected to surge past 160,000 this year, said Property Appraiser Ken Wilkinson, who has held the position for nearly 25 years.

“It’s all driven by speculation,” Wilkinson said. “Everyone wants a piece of the pie.”

Demand far exceeds supply. For instance, at Centex’s new townhouse neighborhood, Hawthorne in Bonita Springs, the company set up an online lottery in June to cork the flood of prospective buyers. In a month, more than 1,800 people signed up for fewer than 400 homes.

“We’re in an environment where projects are presold by reservation, but purchasers don’t know what the price of the unit is that they’ve reserved until the builder begins construction on that unit,” McIntosh said. “From a consumer’s perspective, these are troubling times.”

‘Past the affordability level’

It’s Economics 101. As demand rises, so does the price.

“When you get an imbalance between supply and demand, that generally creates upward pressure in sales and values,” said Frank Gregoire of St. Petersburg, vice chairman of the Florida Real Estate Appraisal Board.

The rising cost of land has coincided with historic increases in the cost of building materials, specifically concrete and steel.

It has come to this: On Sept. 6, south Lee County had a greater percentage of existing home and condominium listings going for at least $500,000 than Boca Raton, one of the wealthiest places in America. The proportion of half-million-dollar dwellings in Bonita Springs, Estero and San Carlos Park combined accounted for nearly 45 percent of the total listings; Boca’s $500,000 homes accounted for just 35 percent of its listings.

In San Carlos Park alone, the number of $500,000-plus homes outnumbered $200,000-and-lower homes by a margin of 100 to 18.

“You’re getting up there with some California places,” said Wayne Archer, a University of Florida real estate professor. “Scary thought, isn’t it?. . .Certainly, the housing cost is rising beyond the reach of much of the population. But if you have people moving in from elsewhere, the question is what they bring.”

The rate of appreciation isn’t uniform throughout south Lee. In the Estero ZIP code of 33928, the appraised value of existing homes and condominiums grew 25 percent between 2004 and 2005, a Daily News analysis of county appraiser’s figures indicates. But in Bonita’s 34134 ZIP — which includes pricey Bonita Bay, Pelican Landing and Bonita Beach — the overall value only went up 10 percent.

But no matter where you look, the price of housing is getting out of reach for many.

After nearly a decade of constructing commercial buildings across Southwest Florida, Walter Crawford created a home-building company two years ago to take advantage of the rising market. For the past year, Bonita-based Heatherwood Homes has been building what he calls “starter homes” on vacant, scattered lots in San Carlos Park. All have three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and all are in the same, middle-class neighborhood.

The first sold for $199,000. The next for $230,000. Then the price jumped to $250,000. Now, Crawford has one listed for over $300,000.

“Three hundred thousand dollars is fair market for that house. But with the workforce coming to the area, it’s still $300,000 for the police officer, the firefighter and the people just starting out. We’re getting past the affordability level,” he said.

Who pays the price?

Even federally subsidized affordable housing projects are getting too expensive for their clients. The most a developer can charge and still qualify for the loan programs is nearly $190,000 in Lee County.

Mary Sorge, head of the nonprofit Bonita Springs Area Housing Development Corp., said she nonetheless has a waiting list of 150 clients and isn’t taking any more applications. She doesn’t want to get people’s hopes up.

On a national scale, the home ownership rate among Hispanics is gradually rising but remains significantly lower than that of non-Hispanic whites. In figures released in July, the U.S. Census reported a 49.2 homeownership rate for Hispanics and 75.6 percent for whites.

Three years ago, Sorge estimated, roughly 90 percent of her clients were Hispanic. Today, the percentage has dropped to 40 percent because, she said, “the high cost of housing is affecting everyone.”

“It’s so expensive to buy right now,” said Ana Acosta, 23, a food service supervisor at Bonita Springs Charter School.

She and her husband have three children, ranging from 3 months to 4 years in age.

“We’re in the process of buying,” she said. “Once you get kids, you’ve got to get a place of your own.”

For now, her family of five occupies two rooms of her parents’ three-bedroom Bonita Springs home. To earn their keep, they pay the utility bills, which run about $400 a month. They are trying to clear up some minor issues with their credit and save up for the $20,000 down payment for a $250,000-$300,000 home. Acosta thinks they can scrape together $12,000 and cover the rest with a government assistance program.

Still, she said, “It’s going to be next to impossible.”

Employers are having trouble hiring because of the escalating home prices and rents.

The Lee County School District needs to hire scores of teachers to fill the 40 new schools it needs to build in the next decade to meet state class-size requirements. But with a first-year salary of $30,473, many teachers simply can’t afford to work and live here, said Greg Adkins, executive director of human resources and employee relations for the district.

“People will come here from out of the area and look at the cost of housing and change their mind,” he said.

District officials are looking into buying an apartment complex or renovating a building the district already owns to house teachers, Adkins said.

Southwest Florida faces the greatest employee shortages in health care and skilled construction labor, said Joe Paterno of the Southwest Florida Workforce Development Board.

“If you see trucks running around, you always see signs on them that say, ‘Carpenters needed,’” he said.

The lucky many

Chris and Michael Bielski are self-proclaimed “lower middle-class kids from Brooklyn.” The couple ran a successful taxi cab fleet around New York City and had no plans of leaving. But the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 changed that.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Do we really want to raise kids in this environment?” said Chris Bielski, who was pregnant at the time with twin girls.

So, they packed up their lives and moved to Bonita Beach. They bought a house near Beach Access No. 3 for $475,000. They sold it in 1998 for $1.2 million.

A flurry of purchases followed. Bielski, now 53 years old and a Bonita Springs Zoning Board member and president of the Bonita Beach Improvement Association, has bought 10 properties worth millions of dollars solely on Little Hickory Island and Fort Myers Beach. Some, she and her husband have sold; others they’ve rented for $2,200 a week.

In one case, they paid $767,000 for the home immediately north of Beach Access No. 1 in 1999 and sold it two years later for a cool $2.02 million.

The Bielskis cashed in years before the south Lee market took off. How did they know?

“My husband had a good point,” Bielski said. “People are going to want to retire here. They don’t want to retire to a high rise on the east coast (of Florida). That’s what our parents did.”

If you want to buy some land in eastern Estero, talk to Franz Rosinus. In recent years, he has acquired 6,745 acres of vacant land, easily making him the biggest landowner in south Lee County.

“I think Bonita Springs is better than Naples,” said Rosinus, a German immigrant who has amassed a fortune in real estate and become an American citizen since coming to Southwest Florida in 1991. “When I said that to local brokers, they laughed at me. Now they’re not laughing anymore.”

Rosinus and his partners have sunk $40 million into purchasing 6,150 acres of orange groves over the last four years. The sprawling property straddles Corkscrew Road and reaches as far north as State Road 82. He calls it Old Corkscrew Plantation and envisions raising 6,000 homes there and reconstructing old flowways and preserving some spots for nature.

But the county land-use designation limits development in that region to just one home for every 10 acres to help curb urban sprawl and replenish drinking water reserves. That knocks down Rosinus’ dream to a mere 600 homes or so.

He isn’t fazed, though. “We are active farmers now. We have a nice cash flow coming from the fruits. We’re not in a hurry.”

Boom or bust?

Not everyone shares Rosinus’ patience in today’s real estate market.

In Bonita Springs, Estero and San Carlos Park, more than 500 homes and condominiums sold at least two times between July 2004 and July 2005. Flipping properties is to the 21st century what day-trading stocks was to the 1990s.

The financial windfall grows from south to north, according to the Daily News analysis. In Bonita, the 233 properties averaged $53,622 in profit for the second seller. In Estero, the average markup for the 179 properties was $75,509. And, in San Carlos Park, the typical quick sale on 97 properties netted $83,812.

“We’ve experienced a boom,” said McIntosh, the land broker, “and I suppose a boom entails a bust.”

The amount of speculation worries real estate pundits and local officials because it artificially inflates prices. Can a bust be far behind?

On this, experts agree: Homes can’t appreciate at the rates they have been in Lee County forever. But when the end comes, the housing market likely won’t nose-dive. Instead, prices will level off, appreciating at a more modest pace.

Burke, who traded in computers for mortgages, has his own Web site that proclaims in bold letters at the top: “No bubble in Florida, just BEACH!” But even he acknowledges that the days of reaping real estate rewards won’t “go on for an eternity.”

The future still looks bright, though. Burke sent out an e-mail recently to 250 members of his old golf country club back in Cleveland, offering to host a seminar in the clubhouse on Florida real estate. He received 45 reservations in 48 hours.