Brad O'Connor Directly addresses camera: The latest monthly housing market statistics from the Florida Realtors Research Department show that existing home sales in Florida continued to march along at a torrid pace in November. Let's start by looking at the resale market for single-family homes, where we logged just over 26,400 November closed sales. 
Now, at first glance, someone with little experience tracking real estate markets might say, "Hey, that's almost 3,000 *fewer* closed sales than you reported in October!" And, well, they'd be right about that. But, they'd also be ignoring a major characteristic of housing markets that is always in play, which is what we economists refer to as "seasonality," or "seasonal effects." In plainer English, what I mean is that there are certain months every year where we almost always tend to see fewer numbers of Closed Sales, regardless of current economic and market trends. And, well, November just happens to be one of those months. It has one fewer calendar day than most other months of the year, it has major holidays like Thanksgiving and, well, Black Friday, and it occurs well after the Spring and Summer buying seasons have concluded. As you can see from this chart, Closed Sales dipped from October to November in 2018 and 2019, as well.
Because seasonality has such a strong impact on month-over-month changes in housing market statistics, it's long been our practice Ñ and the practice of real estate industry analysts everywhere Ñ to pay much closer attention to year-over-year statistics. That is, statistics that compare differences in stats for the same month this year versus last year. And that's why I say November 2020 was yet another strong month for single-family home sales. Compared to November 2019, Closed Sales were up almost 23 percent statewide this November Ñ the highest percent increase we've in any month this year, apart from October's nearly 27 percent increase. And this growth in sales remained very broad-based in November, with all 22 of Florida's metro areas seeing positive year-over-year gains.
The question remains, though, how long can we keep up this pace? Mortgage rates remain at all-time lows and demand will likely remain strong in the coming months, but inventory levels Ñ particularly for single-family homes Ñ remain far below normal levels. As of the end of November, our statewide inventory of single-family homes was down over 41 percent compared to a year ago. Even listings of properties north of a million dollars, where we've had a *relative* abundance of inventory, are down by almost 25 percent.
This lack of supply continues to keep home prices elevated as there remains strong competition for the properties that *are* on the market. In November, the median price among closed sales of single-family homes was $305,000, which matches October's figure but still represents a more than 14 percent year-over-year increase. As I've said before, some of this figure represents a shift in the mix of the types of homes that are selling Ñ we've seen a greater share of luxury home sales this year because the inventory shortage hasn't hit this segment of the market as hard Ñbut a substantial amount of this increase is entirely due to the lack of supply in the face of strong demand resulting in greater competition among prospective home buyers.
Over in the condo/townhouse category, inventory hasn't been quite as much of an issue, but statewide, it was still down 14-and-a-half percent year-over-year at the end of November. Still, the death of the condo market that was much speculated about at the beginning of the pandemic turns out to have been greatly exaggerated. Closed sales in this category were up over 30 percent year-over-year, which was good enough to push our annual sales totals for this category through November above our sales totals through this point in time last year, by a fraction of a percentage point. The renewed demand for these multifamily property types certainly shows in the median sale price, which for November came in at $228,000 Ñ nearly 17 percent increase compared to a year ago.
Now, in this video, I've mostly focused on the state as a whole, but as you know, every local market has its own trends you need to be aware of. So Realtors, be sure to check out sunstats.floridarealtors.org for interactive local market statistics, or visit our storehouse of local- and state-level market reports at floridarealtors.org/research. I'll see you next month for the December statistics and a recap of this crazy year in Florida real estate!