ORLANDO—Tourism and construction are two mainstays of the Orlando market. Both of them took a hard hit in the recession.

“We came to a virtual standstill,” Melissa Marcolini-Quinn, who runs NorthMarq's Central Florida operations as SVP and senior director, tells GlobeSt.com. “From a financing standpoint, we were almost considered the pariah of the nation. I would call up a lender, and if you said the deal was anywhere in Florida, they didn't want to talk to you.”

Marcolini-Quinn calls it sad story because even though some Orlando submarkets—and some submarkets—were performing strong nobody wanted to hear about the rays of sunshine. The storm is over though. The unemployment rate in Orlando is not only below the Florida average—it's below the national average.