I have during these past 2 years found those articles in the paper very misleading.
I bought a house in that zip code 2 years ago (2004) and have been following the median housing pricing vs. the homes being sold around the neighborhood.
The Orlando Sentinel has been great at covering news about the big condo boom in the area, but has done a poor job at covering information in regards to Single Family Homes.
There is one trend that the Orlando Sentinel has not mentioned and it is the renovating/remodeling of either historic homes or upgrading from homes that are 20+ years old.
Many of those properties that I have seen sold for a lower (but close) to the median sell price, are homes that needed some serious renovation and/or were condemned due to irreparable damage. If they were to take a closer look, they would see that the sales price covers mostly the expensive lot value instead of the value of the building.
1/2 the buyers have been selling those properties at a large profit (after renovating the places), and this process takes about a year or so due to the restrictions of the Historic Preservation Board, others (as in my case) have taken our time to fix up the place, give the shine back to those original wood floor, bring back the beautiful wood-work-detail and put some TLC to those historic homes.
I bought my house for 200k less than what I can sell it for right now, but it will not be part of the statistics the Orlando Sentinel uses, since I am planning on staying here for as long as I can.
There are many different factors to look into than those from the new condo boom... which I have not yet seen the media take into account when looking at the home sales price of areas like College Park and the 32801, 32803 zip codes.
