Buyers find hot bargains in Florida

Welcome to Florida: sun, surf and loads of property at fire-sale prices.

Want a house that looks like a million but costs thousands less? A duplex for less than $100,000? Florida has 'em.

The plummeting prices are luring buyers from other states to communities along the Atlantic Coast and Gulf Coast in search of primary homes, vacation homes, retirement homes, you name it.

Median prices, year-over-year, have tumbled almost 30 percent in Miami and Cape Coral-Fort Myers, and almost 25 percent in Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, according to First American CoreLogic, which tracks values nationally.

This month, in Palm Beach County alone, Foreclosure.com had postings for 15,120 foreclosed houses, 10,545 in preforeclosure, 107 sheriff sales and 820 houses involved in bankruptcies.

For Raymond Sterling, a New Jersey dentist, and his wife, designer Beth Markward, the winter retreat they just bought in a 12-year-old building overlooking the Delray Beach yacht club was a bargain at about $700,000.

"My bet is that I paid at least 40 percent off what the price would have been six months ago," Sterling said.

Looking to spend quite a bit less?

Mark and Susan Schultz found a duplex in Lehigh Acres, 10 miles east of Fort Myers, for $90,000 — because of a foreclosure, more than one-third less than the original price of $320,000.

They will rent it to tenants as an investment property.

"We wanted to buy investment property with positive cash flow in Pennsylvania, but we couldn't find anything, so we looked at Florida," said Mark Schultz, 59, a Philadelphia lawyer.

"They were asking $100,000 for the duplex; we countered with $90,000, and it was accepted. We then found tenants for each unit, each paying $750 a month."