The Number Most Homeowners Are Afraid to Look At
July 6, 2026 · 5 min read
There's a piece of information most Southwest Florida homeowners carry around without ever examining: what their home is actually worth right now.
Not what Zillow guesses. Not what the neighbor's cousin got in 2022. The real number — and more importantly, what it makes possible.
I've noticed something in years of sitting with people through big transitions: we avoid looking at certain numbers because looking feels like committing. If I find out what the house is worth, I have to decide something. So we don't look. And the not-looking quietly makes decisions for us — usually the expensive kind, usually at the worst possible time.
June's market data makes this a good month to stop not-looking.
What Just Happened in Cape Coral
The short version: home values here rose for the third consecutive month — the median single-family sale price reached $390,000 in June, up 4.3% from a year ago — while the number of homes for sale dropped almost 30% from last summer.
You don't need to care about real estate statistics for that to matter to you. Here's the translation: if you've owned your home for seven, ten, fifteen years, the equity sitting in it has likely grown again — and equity is not just a bragging number. It's the raw material of your next season of life.
It's what funds the rightsized home with the smaller lanai to maintain. It's what makes aging in place affordable when the house needs modifications. It's what turns "we could never afford assisted living for Mom" into an actual conversation with actual options. It's the difference between a future you design and a future that happens to you.
The Fear Underneath
Let me name what's really going on, because I've watched it play out too many times to be polite about it.
Most people don't avoid planning because they're lazy. They avoid it because every version of the plan touches something tender — leaving the house where the kids grew up, admitting the stairs are becoming a problem, wondering whether the money will last, not wanting to be a burden, not wanting to think about being older than we feel.
So the plan waits. And then something forces it — a fall, a diagnosis, a spouse's death, a roof and an insurance bill in the same season — and now the family is making the biggest financial and emotional decisions of a lifetime in weeks instead of years, under pressure, often from out of state.
I have had a front-row seat to both versions: the family that planned early and the family that planned in a hospital hallway. The difference between them was never money or luck. It was that one family looked at their numbers while looking was still optional.
What Looking Actually Involves
Not much, honestly. It starts with three questions:
What is the home worth today? Real market value, based on what's actually selling in your neighborhood — not an algorithm's guess.
What does that equity make possible? Staying and modifying, rightsizing nearby, relocating closer to family, funding care, or simply knowing the cushion exists.
What would need to be true for each option? Timelines, costs, what the home might need, what the market is doing. Most options have a longer runway than people assume — which is exactly why early is easier.
Notice what's not on that list: selling. Most of the homeowners I run numbers for don't sell — not that year, sometimes not ever. The point isn't a transaction. The point is that staying should be a choice you made, not a default you drifted into.
One Thoughtful Step
This is what Living Well Forward is for — the planning side of living well. Not wellness in the smoothie sense; wellness in the "my future has a shape and I chose it" sense.
If it's been more than a year since you looked at your number, send me a note through the contact page, and I'll put together a no-pressure equity snapshot for your home. It's not a listing appointment. There's no follow-up campaign. It's one conversation that turns a fear you've been circling into information you can use — even if moving is years away, or never happens at all.
Because living well isn't just about where you live. It's about how you live — and how ready you are for what's next.
Carleen Murone is the founder of Living Well in SWFL, a Real Estate Advisor with eXp Realty, and a Certified Functional Nutrition Counselor helping Southwest Florida residents live well through every season of life.