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After years of looking, Thelma Benavides thought she would never be able to afford her own home in south Lee County.

Benavides, who has spent most of her life in Southwest Florida, almost left her family and friends behind to move to Texas where home prices are much cheaper.

Even the cost of renting an apartment was getting too expensive for Benavides, a 25-year-old single mother of three children.

“I was thinking about leaving the state permanently and not coming back because of the high prices,” said Benavides, who works as a customer service agent for an insurance company. “For residents that have low income or are single parents with children, it’s very tough.”

Over the past few years, Southwest Florida’s real estate boom caused property values to nearly double and in some cases triple, pricing low- to middle-income residents such as Benavides out of the housing market.

Though the cost of just about everything it takes to build a house, from construction materials to fill dirt to wages, went up during the boom, the real culprit behind the dramatic property increases was rising land values, many experts say.

In some areas, during the period between 1999 and mid-2005, the price of land more than just doubled or tripled; it increased by 10, 20 or even 30 times its original value. In much of Lee County, particularly in booming Bonita Springs and San Carlos Park, the cost of a lot now exceeds what a house and land cost a decade ago.

MICHEL FORTIER / Daily News

Matthew Lombardo of Habitat for Humanity watches over Virginia high school student volunteers Mitch Mellor, foreground right, Ray Sami, middle, and Alex Solomon, background, at a construction site in Lehigh Acres recently. As the cost of land continues to increase, groups like Habitat for Humanity are looking farther inland for opportunities to build homes.

Many experts agree the market is starting to correct itself but say it is unlikely land will ever be as affordable as it once was.

“We’ll start to see prices come down, but I don’t see values tanking tremendously,” said Denny Grimes, a real estate agent with 24 years of experience in Lee County and owner of Denny Grimes and Co.

Benavides is one of the lucky ones.

She found Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit housing assistance group that helped her build a new home in Bonita Springs just in time.

Now, though, the price of land in much of Bonita Springs is too expensive for Habitat to buy lots to build single-family homes.

“We won’t buy a $100,000 lot,” said Dani Johnson, director of communications for the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. “How do you justify that? We could buy five lots for the same price that we could buy one lot.”

For the first time, the cost of land is making the local Habitat chapter consider building single-family attached villas in Bonita.

“Single-family homes as one unit may not work anymore,” in Bonita, Johnson said. “This is something that we can do to maintain affordability and continue to provide families with homes.”

The cost of land started taking off in Lee County between 1999 and 2005, Grimes said.

During that six-year period, Lee County experienced unprecedented property value increases, but they weren’t foreign to at least one resident.

In 1993, County Manager Don Stilwell moved to Lee County from California, where property values were growing by about 15 percent per year.

“At that time, having lived through California and seeing the desirability of Florida, I was really surprised by the prices here,” Stilwell said. “You could see the potential here and what could reasonably happen, but the growth far exceeded what I expected.”

It was only four or five years ago that the county was still foreclosing on land abandoned by owners who did not want to pay taxes on it, Stilwell said. Many of those lots were located in Lehigh Acres and purchased for hundreds of dollars decades ago.

The history of one such lot illustrates the complete cycle between 1999 and today, Grimes said.

Grimes found the lot by doing a quick search of the Multiple Listing Service, a tool used by real estate agents to find properties listed on the market.

The vacant lot on Eighth Street Southwest in Lehigh Acres sold for $1,600 in 2000. It went for $6,300 in 2002 and was recently listed for $57,900 before the owner lowered the price to $42,900. The lot’s sale is pending, Grimes said.

Similar situations can be found throughout Lee County, Grimes said.

“I don’t care which one you pick, it’s all the same thing,” he said.

For example, a vacant lot on Amarillo Street in San Carlos Estates in Bonita Springs sold for $9,000 in 1988, $15,000 in 1989, $29,000 in 2001 and $41,000 in 2002, according to records from the Lee County Property Appraiser. Most lots for sale in San Carlos Estates now have a listing price of more than $200,000.

In other cases the increase was almost overnight: A vacant lot on Treasure Cay Lane in Spanish Wells in Bonita Springs sold for $85,000 on Feb. 4, 2005, and $180,000 two months later on April 26, 2005.

Lots on the west side of U.S. 41 show increases that follow a similar pattern, just more pronounced, according to property appraiser records.

A vacant lot on Tarpon Avenue in Bonita Springs sold for $18,000 in 1980, $45,000 in 1992, $32,000 in 1999, $34,000 in 2000, $125,000 in 2003 and $250,000 in 2005.

During the period between 1999 and the beginning of 2004, property value increases were fairly rational at 10, 12 and 15 percent, Grimes said. But between 2004 and the middle of 2005, the market exploded, he said.

“You add emotion, which is greed, and you get irrational growth,” Grimes said. “Then you take that emotion after the peak of the market and another emotion takes over - fear. Now prices are falling at an irrational rate because of fear.”

Once prices hit a more rational level, possibly the rate that property was selling for in mid-2005, they will start moving back up again, Grimes predicted.

Others, however, don’t think prices will fall that far.

Brad Hunter, an analyst for Metrostudy, a consulting firm that advises residential developers, said a limited supply of lots in Southwest Florida will keep prices high.

If land development stopped in Collier and Lee counties, the area would run out of vacant lots in about 11 months, Hunter said. By comparison, the area used to have a three-year supply, he said. A healthy market has about a 24- to 30-month supply, he said.

“Collier and Lee land supplies have become scarce and that has pushed the land prices higher,” Hunter said. “That trend will remain in place.”

Still, land sellers will have to come down in their prices before the market picks back up again, he said.

Until a couple of years ago, a seller could get practically any price he named, Hunter said.

“Now, there is a new phenomenon,” he said. “Land sellers are finding that builders occasionally are saying, ‘No, that is too much,’ and walking away. Eventually, land sellers will realize they have to lower their prices.”

When the market eventually does hit the trough, experts say it will head straight back up again and could continue the ascent for a long time to come.

Projected build-out in Lee County is 1.5 million residents, Stilwell said. With just over 500,000 residents, Lee is a little better than a third of the way there.

“With baby boomers on their way, 20 percent of retirees typically come to Florida,” Stilwell said. “There may be some slowing, but we live in a very desirable area.”

For people in a similar situation as Benavides was, that outlook doesn’t look good.

“Ten to 20 years from now, only the rich people will be able to afford housing in Bonita Springs,” Benavides said. “Some of my friends have already left. If you don’t have affordable homes, you don’t attract people to live in Bonita Springs and reach out for their goals because if there is no affordable housing, then where can they start off?”