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 August 2021 compared to August 2020. 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. 2019 will be examined in some areas to highlight the lingering impact of COVID in real estate.
COVID-19 shutdowns were put in place in late spring last year, which subsequently negatively impacted closed sales in mid-summer of 2020. That is part of the reason that we go back to 2019 so that we can get a better comparison.
The inventory crisis last year caused demand to spike higher than ever, which in turn caused prices to continue to increase significantly. This rise has continued to the present day without reason to expect they’ll decrease any time in the near future.
Miami-Dade & Palm Beach Counties
In August of 2021, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties performed exactly the same as Broward County. Single family sales and pending sales are down, but every other category has increased year over year.
What’s Ahead?
We are seeing the market starting to move towards the other side of the post-covid frenzied market. Sales are down year over year- as last year this time the real estate market was still trying to overcompensate for the shutdown that happened in the spring. This slight sway into normalization makes this the best time that buyers have seen in two years, and it will continue this balancing act into winter. With the slight break in competition and with mortgage rates as low as they are, buyers are in a position to get homes at better prices now than they will be able to come spring, so be ready to strike now with updated pre-approvals in hand.
These signs of a more balanced market are likely to be seen through the rest of the year into the beginning of 2022.
*Data provided by Florida Realtors® SunStats