Market Update With Brad O’Connor Ph.D. December 2020 TRT 4 minutes 50 seconds Video Transcription Brad O’Connor directly addresses camera: 2020 was certainly a wild ride for Florida’s housing market, but the newly released monthly market statistics from Florida Realtors show that we ended the year on a high note. I’ll walk you through this month’s numbers in just a minute, but first, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our upcoming annual economic summit, Florida Real Estate Trends 2021. This year’s event will be virtual and will be streamed beginning at 9 AM on Thursday, February 4. Registration is free—just go to floridarealtors.org/trends to sign up! We’ll have a great lineup of guest speakers and panelists for you, including National Association of Home Builders Chief Economist Robert Dietz, who will share his outlook for new home construction—something we badly need to get ourselves out of this persistent inventory shortage. And of course, I’ll be presenting the broader economic and real estate outlook for Florida in 2021, as well. But enough with the promotions, let’s move on to those December numbers! Let’s start with sales. December’s statewide count of closed existing single-family home sales was in excess of 30,000—the second highest total for any month in 2020. This represents a 21 percent increase over the sales count from December 2019, which was a very strong month for sales in its own right. In fact, last winter we were on pace to have one of the best years on record in the residential real estate market. The pandemic dashed those dreams in March, of course, but the housing market has since come roaring back – right now a lot of the right factors are in place for us to get off to another really strong start in 2021. New pending sales of single-family homes were up almost 31 percent year-over-year in December, which strongly signals that we’re going to see this surge in closed sales continue into at least the first couple of months of this year. Overall for 2020, we ended up with almost 6 percent more closed single-family home sales across the state in 2020 than in 2019. But our current rate of sales is better exemplified by what took place during the second half of 2020, with single-family home sales marking an 18 percent year-over-year increase. Condo and townhouse sales finished the year strong as well, rising by almost 28 percent compared to December of last year. This strong finish for condo and townhouse sales put their annual total for 2020 ahead of their 2019 total by 2-and-a-half percent. And in a sign of things to come, new pending sales in this category were up close to 43 percent year-over-year in December. Florida’s ultra-hot luxury market led the way throughout the second half of 2020, and coupled with the overall increase in home value appreciation across the board that we saw over that stretch, the dollar volume of sales in 2020 was far greater than what we saw in 2019. The dollar volume of closed single-family home sales was up by 22-and-a-half percent in 2020, rising to nearly $125 billion. The December median sale price for this category was $309,000, an increase of over 14 percent compared to a year ago. Closed sales in the condo and townhouse category, meanwhile, ended the year with an annual total dollar volume in excess of $36 billion, representing an increase of just under 14 percent. The median sale price for this property type category was up by almost 14 percent year-over-year to $230,000. Inventory levels at year’s end remained quite low. As of December 31st, Florida’s single-family inventory was down over 44 percent and its condo and townhouse inventory was down over 18 percent. That said, new listings were not dramatically lower in 2020 than they were in 2019, overall. The annual totals of new listings in 2020 were only down 3 percent in the single-family category, and in the condo and townhouse category, they were actually *up* a little over 1 percent compared to 2019. But with demand running hot, thanks in large part to these low mortgage interest rates we’re experiencing, homes are moving much more quickly and in greater numbers than usual, resulting in a lower level of inventory at any given point in time. I’ll be back next month to let you know how we fared in January, but in the meantime, be sure to check out your local market’s stats at floridarealtors.org/research. And again, be sure to register for Florida Real Estate Trends 2021 at floridarealtors.org/trends! Thanks for watching.