Searching for an apartment complex in Bonita Springs doesn't take long.

There aren't any.

While the booming real estate market has sent prices skyrocketing for would-be homebuyers, the side effect of condominium conversions has hit renters hard. In south Lee County, almost every apartment complex has fallen victim to the conversion trend.

The last apartment complex in Bonita Springs, Monterra, is in the process of selling its recently converted units. Estero has a lone complex remaining, Estero Woods Village.

To find an apartment complex, people now travel to Fort Myers or North Fort Myers, but there, too, the trend has caught on. Within the past five years, about a dozen Fort Myers complexes, eight in Bonita and a handful in Estero and San Carlos Park have converted or are in the process of converting.

That has left renters like Don Drew, 81, and Jane Drew, 78, with few options.

The retired couple had to find another place to live when Monterra announced earlier this year it was converting to condominiums. They couldn't afford the price tag of $349,000 — with a possible $15,000 discount — and didn't want to take on a mortgage at their age.

So they signed a lease for the Monterey apartment complex in Fort Myers, starting in July.

Now Monterey has been sold for $80 million to an investment company that plans to convert the complex to condominiums.

The Drews were afraid of that.

“We at least have a year lease,” Don Drew said. “Then we will have to figure something out.”

The conversion trend is national. A total of 191,400 apartments were taken out of the condo market last year because they've all been converted to condominiums, according to the National Association of Realtors.

In Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties alone, about 63,000 apartments have gone condo since 2004, said Brad Hunter, South Florida market director for MetroStudy, a Palm Beach-based analysis firm.

The same boom in land prices that caused home prices to go up is the reason behind the condo conversion trend, Hunter said. Land for new condo projects is scarce and pricey, and condominium prices were going up substantially faster than values of rental development. That combination made existing rental complexes prime buys for converters.

“It was immensely more profitable to build and sell condos on those rental complexes than rental apartments,” Hunter said.

The individual condominiums are often sold to investors or seasonal residents who then put them back on the market as rentals. But converters typically tighten the rental market and make availability an issue, plus they tend to cause an increase in rental rates, said Ann Bailey, a CB Richard Ellis, a real estate agency.

“That's what happened to Cheryl Thoren when her apartments, the Tides at Pelican Landing, converted last year. The new owner bought the condo as an investment so Thoren was able to continue renting, but her rent jumped by $100 a month. And she might be looking at another hike when she renews her lease later this year.

The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Lee County during the last quarter of 2005 was $772, according to her research, up 7 percent from just six months earlier.

Monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment was just under $900, up 5 percent in six months.

That means people like Brian Foy, a Fort Myers renter looking for a place to live, have to either find a roommate — or several roommates — or commute from much farther north or east.

Foy shared an apartment with three other people, splitting the monthly rent of $1,260 plus utilities. A restaurant server, the 24-year-old doesn't make enough to afford of the condos being rented out by investors in various complexes.

Foy has been looking, but hasn't found much.

Neither has Francesca Sickler and her family. Her husband owns a used-car business in Naples, and moving any farther north than Bonita Springs would make the commute “a pain in the butt,” she said.

“He already has an hour's commute in season,” she said. “But the rents they are asking anywhere around here are just ridiculous.”

The conversion market is slowing, but it will be years before any apartments will become available, Bailey said.

“Even if the municipalities found a way to partner with businesses or someone had a property and they started building apartments, it will be two years before anyone could move in,” she said.

One company, Naples-based JFT LLC, is trying to break the trend and build 36 new apartments on East Terry Street. This month, the apartments were supposed to open out of reach of many in the working class, said John Steinward, partner and principal broker in Naples Realty, which handles rentals in Lee and Collier counties.

“People are getting pinched,” Steinward said. “Most times they come to us and we can't even find anything they can afford.”