The Lamacchia Realty South Florida Housing Report presents overall home sale statistics and highlights the average sale prices for single families, condominiums/townhomes in Broward County, Miami-Dade County, and Palm Beach County for March 2022 compared to March 2021. It also looks at other metrics like New Listings and New Pending Sales as they are often the best indicators for predicting future trends in the market
The inventory crisis last year caused demand to spike higher than ever by fall and into the winter, which in turn caused prices to continue to increase significantly. This rise has continued to present day without reason to expect they’ll decrease anytime soon, though the hope is that the rate of increase will slow down especially now that mortgage rates have risen.
Broward County
Broward County single family sales, new listings, and pending sales decreased, but average prices increased year over year. For condos/townhomes, sales and average prices increased, but new listings and pending sales decreased year over year.
Miami-Dade & Palm Beach Counties
In March of 2022, Miami-Dade single families saw decreases in every category. Condos/townhomes show an increase in closed sales, and average price, but pending sales and new listings are down year over year.
Palm Beach County saw a decrease in every category for single families. Condos/townhomes in Palm-Beach County saw an increase in closed sales and average price but pending sales and new listings decreased.
South Florida Inventory
Supply remains tight as available inventory continues to be cannibalized by frenzied homebuyers, keeping prices generally higher compared to March 2021. See the red line in the chart above. It is suspected that available inventory will start to climb a bit with the rise in mortgage rates nationally, but South Florida may be less impacted, especially for condos, by the rates with so many cash buyers.
What’s Ahead?
Mortgage rates have spiked above 5% in recent weeks, and we are already seeing the effects of this spike on closed sales, particularly in single family home sales which decreased across the board in March 2022 as well as in new listings and pending sales for both singles and condos in all three counties. Decreases in new listings and in pending sales indicates that closed sales and pending sales could be down for April.
Conversely, condos/townhomes saw an increase in closed sales in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade county mostly due to an influx of all-cash buyers who dominated the space.
Interestingly, there has been a notable uptick nationally in price changes in the market recently, demonstrating a slight lessening of seller power, and a sign that the market is, in fact, already starting to change. Anthony explained this in his recent Market Update video, click here to watch.
As mortgage rates increase, housing affordability and securing financing becomes a very real concern for buyers. Many that qualified for financing under a lower rate must be re-preapproved at a higher rate, and their budgets have to be adjusted for the new cost. This can lead to looking for homes in a lower price bracket as the higher rates and continually rising prices require higher down payments and higher monthly mortgage payments. We could be seeing the impact on closed sales in the coming months.
*Data provided by Florida Realtors® SunStats