So what does $250,000 get you these days?
Richard Newquist, Realtor
www.LiveAtTheBeach.net

ORLANDO, Fla. – Feb. 12, 2007 – A cool quarter of a million dollars. Two hundred and fifty grand. That’s roughly what it takes to buy a typical used home in Central Florida these days.
Existing-home sales soared to record heights in 2004-05, taking prices with them: The median resale price of a home in the Orlando area rose more than 60 percent in those two years alone, according to data gathered by the Orlando Regional Realtor Association.

In the Jacksonville Beachside area (beachside is east of the Intercoastal) is stagnant or dropping. Still, $250,000 won't get you much. Up in the Mayport area, there are still homes for sale for less than that and those are probably still a good deal. Everything else beachside costs more. Anything within 15 blocks of the beach is in the $400,000 range and up.

The general opinion is that, Florida wide, home prices are stuck in neutral: For nearly a year now, the median has been exactly $250,000 or within a few thousand dollars of that amount in the Realtors’ core Orlando market, which consists mainly of Orange and Seminole counties but includes some sales in surrounding counties.

So what kind of home can you get for that quarter of a mil?

The answer varies widely depending on where the home is located in Central Florida. That same amount will fetch you a condo or small bungalow in downtown Orlando – or a nicely appointed pool home with a big yard in outlying parts of Volusia, Lake or Osceola counties.

One of Hunt’s Volusia County listings, for example, is a 2,247-square-foot, four-bedroom, two-bath home built last year in Orange City that’s priced at $250,000.

By contrast, a 912-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath home built in 1938 in College Park – minutes from downtown Orlando – is also listed for $250,000.

“Much of it depends on how close the home is to jobs,” said Michael Rodriguez, an agent and operations director with Ample Realty in Casselberry.
He said he has a home with about 1,300 square feet in Casselberry listed for $239,900 that would sell for “probably at least $50,000 or $60,000 more” if it were “closer to downtown Orlando or Winter Park.”

The same applies to the Jacksonville area. It is hard to find "affordable housing" near the Downtown areas, Orange Park and the Beaches.

“Three years ago, you could get so much more” for $250,000, said Richard Newquist, agent for Coral Shores Realty in Jacksonville. The Jacksonville median price has slowed.

Most of the surge in prices came during 2004-05, when interest rates were low, the inventory of local homes for sale was tight and speculators began snapping up homes and fanning the inflationary psychology.

But the market slowed abruptly last year, and the median price flattened out at $250,000.
Economists and industry experts say two of the three factors that fed the sales boom are now gone: Investors are no longer looking to flip properties for a quick profit, and the number of homes listed for sale has swelled more than sixfold to record and near-record levels.
Supply is up and demand is down, a recipe for “continued softness in pricing,” said Michael Larson, a real-estate analyst with Weiss Research in Jupiter.

Orlando’s core-market existing-home inventory slipped from a peak of 21,324 in October to fewer than 20,000 by year’s end, but “a lot of that is seasonal,” Larson said. He predicts that many new listings will surface soon as people who yanked homes off the market late last year make another attempt to sell them during the prime home-shopping season this spring. In January, inventory rebounded to 21,266 properties for sale.

Larson, local Realtors and other industry experts say the median price is a figure that, like most statistics, has strengths and weaknesses. The number is best used as a long-term indicator of trends, because it can be volatile from month to month – though not as volatile as a market’s average sale price. The average in any one month can be skewed by the sale of a handful of very expensive or inexpensive homes.

The median figure avoids that problem. Hunt, a veteran agent with Realty Executives Orlando, said the median price has flattened out in the Orlando area as affordability issues finally kicked in and sales fell.

The median has stopped rising, he said, in part because “people are buying at the bottom of the market, because it’s all they can afford,” and sellers have been slow to give ground by lowering their asking price.

For example, the average list price reported in January by Realtors in the Orlando area was $329,374 – about $80,000 more than the median for that month. And the average list price never fell below $300,000 last year, despite the sales slowdown, as local sellers clung to hope that the market would soon rebound in their favor.

Hunt said the lack of “entry-level, or starter, housing is a real concern” throughout Central Florida. While housing prices now are “relatively stable” compared with recent years, he said, sharp increases in homeowner-insurance premiums and in newly resold homes’ property taxes have added to the pressure on prices and made it difficult for Realtors to close sales, Hunt said. Home prices, he said, are “out of reach for many people.”

This edited version has Copyright © 2007 The Orlando Sentinel, Fla., Jerry W. Jackson. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

http://www.LiveAtTheBeach.net

Condo Market In Jacksonville
http://www.LiveAtTheBeach.net

Edited by Richard Newquist

ORLANDO, Fla. – Feb. 13, 2007 – The condo craze is over but the condo market isn’t dead yet, builders and developers gathered at an industry trade show said last Thursday.

The glut of condominium projects under construction in markets from Miami to Jacksonville means that thousands of new units will flood an already large pool.

The Florida Association of Realtors says while the condo market has experienced the same slowdown in sales as the single-family home market, declines in local markets have been less severe...but not much.

For example, 2006 condo sales in Palm Beach County fell 28 percent from the previous year, while single-family-home sales dropped 37 percent, the association says.

One of the great problems in the Jacksonville area, said Richard Newquist, agent for Coral Shores Realty is that so many condos in our area, especially Ponte Vedra, are condo conversions. The association fees started out low--maybe artificially low--but they had to be raised to cover the actual costs. A 2/2 in Ocean Grove started out at $180/month fees but are not up to $340 per month. Combine that with rising interest rates and many buyers have suddenly been priced out of the market.

Sharon Dworkin Bell, the National Association of Home Builders’ senior staff vice president for multifamily housing, said condos remain an attractive “lifestyle choice” for many home buyers. Developer Donges agreed.

“Today’s buyers want to live close to work, transportation, entertainment and retail,” he said. “A great location, a distinct product and a good price for your market are critical to a condominium community’s success.” Developers say don’t expect condo construction cranes to create downtown traffic jams forever.

But from Miami to Jacksonville, there are thousands of unsold condo units that have to be absorbed as a result of builders trying to satiate the region’s perceived demand for condo units. Many of the region’s high-end rental properties were also converted to condos. But that all came to a screeching halt last year as a growing number of high-priced units found a shrinking number buyers.

Because income has not kept pace with double-digit home-price appreciation, many would-be home buyers have become or remained renters.

In Palm Beach County, a survey by the Housing Leadership Council showed that 90 percent of the workforce could not afford the median-priced single-family home, which cost more than $390,000 at the time.

For all of 2006, with the boom over and housing prices falling, the median-priced single-family home remained out of reach at $384,700.

At the peak of the condo frenzy, developer Donges said, he was building about 80 percent condos and 20 percent rental apartments.

Today, with investors out of the condo market, Donges said the 2007 forecast calls for a reversal in the multifamily formula: condos, 20 percent; rental apartments, 80 percent.

This is especially true in markets where the rental market is tight, such as Palm Beach County, where some of the rental properties that converted or began converting to condos during the housing boom have begun turning back to rentals.

In markets where affordability is a major issue, such as Palm Beach County, rental apartments will be a prime focus of developers, Donges said.

This is the edited version of Copyright © 2007, The Palm Beach Post, Fla. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.