We have met the enemy and they're our former customers.

Several Tampa area builders representatives warned Wednesday that the industry hasn't done enough to prevent the return of destabilizing real estate speculators once the housing market improves.

"No one is equipped to deal with a recovery," said Tampa real estate attorney Daniel Molloy, who framed the issue as "curing the speculator problem."

New home sales are off about 75 percent since the peak in 2005-06. But when the economy turns around and people reacquire their taste for Florida living, you can expect fly-by-night builders to return to the market seeking quick sales, Molloy said.

The task of the organizations such as the Tampa Bay Builders Association will be to encourage longtime builders with less of a home-as-commodity mind-set.

Jim Deitch, chief operating officer of Pasco County's Southern Crafted Homes, described the prevailing fast-buck approach this way: "Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Get as much as you can."

Molloy and Deitch headlined a "builders round table" for the media at Stewart Title of Tampa on Wednesday morning.

Deitch admitted his speculator-averse business approach plays to his strengths. His building company — with about 100 sales during a good year — rarely, if ever, chased investors during the boom.

That's allowed Southern Crafted to weather the current housing hurricane. He called his build-and-bail competitors "fair-weather builders."

About 10 locally active builders have either gone out of business or declared bankruptcy. Many relied on sales to speculators who, once the market turned down, dumped homes onto the foreclosure market.

Molloy advanced the theory that the housing bubble was ultimately caused by local government land use restrictions that drove up the price of developable acreage. He traced the origins of the crisis to 2000.

He worried that when the market starts humming again in a few years, the area will quickly burn through its surplus of about 30,000 developed lots with few means to bring new lots online quickly.

For the time being, that's a small worry. Molloy verified that developed lots in the Tampa Bay area actually sell at a loss these days.

There's such a glut that builders and developers eager to sell land can't recoup the roughly $18,000 per lot they poured into laying roads and installing utilities.