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Strong showing in home market
June was the fourth straight month that sales topped the 1,000 mark in the Sarasota-Bradenton market, a level that harkens back to the pace of summer 2005, when the real estate boom was still in swing.
Though posting only a third as many sales in Charlotte County-North Port, the market represented the second-largest percentage gain statewide.
Prices did not show quite the same trajectory, but were still generally positive. The median sales price of $170,400 in Sarasota-Bradenton was a 5 percent increase from a year ago and up 2.4 percent from May, according to data released Thursday by Florida Realtors, the former Florida Association of Realtors.
The median in neighboring Charlotte was showing the effects of low-priced distressed properties, down 27 percent from June 2009.
But the region’s strong showing — and a 17 percent spike in sales statewide — was somewhat overshadowed by a 5.1 percent decline nationally, evidence that the broader housing market is struggling and may drag on the recovery.
That could be true in Florida, too, once the acceleration created by the government’s $8,000 federal tax credit for first-time buyers wears off.
Jack McCabe, a Deerfield Beach-based real estate analyst, thinks the tax credits moved many buyers who would otherwise have purchased a home later this year into the buying spree of the last six months.
“I think it was a rush to get closings done prior to June 30,” McCabe said, referring to the previous deadline for closing on a deal. “It didn’t really increase the buyers pool, it just moved them forward.”
But others think Southwest Florida will fare better than most markets because the region was shocked into reality more swiftly than other parts of the state when the real estate boom ended.
“I think the buyers and sellers here are better informed, and while sometimes it’s been painful they understand the local market now,” said Charryl Youman, a Venice-based real estate agent with Prudential Florida Realty. “So because our prices make sense, buyers are buying.”
That is not true in many other places, even in markets as close as Collier County, Youman maintains.
“My parents live down in Naples, and there many people still have their head in the sand about pricing,” she said. “They’re still holding onto prices from the peak. Those people are waiting, saying they can wait for their price. Well, they’re still waiting. Here, we’ve largely gotten past that.”
But the overall Florida market is still looking at serious challenges, not the least of which are high unemployment and little population growth, McCabe said.
“All the main indicators for a healthy real estate market are in the negative right now,” he said.
With nearly half of Florida homeowners currently underwater on their mortgages, it “only portends to a large volume of future foreclosures in short sales,” McCabe said.
“These will be the price drivers in the marketplace,” he said. “That’s why, although we may be seeing increasing sales, we’re still seeing flat or decreasing prices.”
Also pressuring this region are the numerous distressed properties still on the market and the fact that many of the best offerings among them already have been picked off by hungry investors, said Kathy Marlowe, a real estate broker with Kathy Marlowe & Associates Realty.
Those remaining are often in bad condition — having been abandoned or stripped by their owners — and the ones that are move-in ready are being snapped up quickly, usually with multiple offers coming in.
Distressed sales have turned the Sarasota-Bradenton market into a patchwork of hyperlocal mini-markets, each with its own trends pulling on prices at different times.
“It’s so local, that it’s down to neighborhoods now,” Marlowe said. “If a neighborhood has been fortunate enough to not have a lot of short sales and foreclosures, the value will hold better. But you can have the same kind of homes in a neighborhood just next to it and the foreclosures will have taken their toll.”
By the time the housing downturn is finished, there will likely be few neighborhoods spared from distressed sales, but the timing varies.
“In certain ways, it’s not unlike back in 2006, where you’re out there and you really have to watch closely to stay ahead of those developments, when those prices are going to turn,” Marlowe said. “You’ll have a neighborhood where the short sales and foreclosures are still pending, and once they close, those closing prices will become the neighborhood’s new comps and everything could begin going down.”
Statewide, 18,371 homes changed hands last month while the median sales price dropped 3 percent to $137,700 from a year ago. The price also was down 1.9 percent from $140,400 in May.
Sales nationally dropped 6.5 percent in the South, but the decline was led by a more than 9 percent drop from in the West. Sales were down 7.5 percent in the Midwest but up nearly 8 percent in the Northeast.
The median sale price was $183,700, up 1 percent from a year earlier.
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