Brad O'Connor directly addresses camera:  The latest housing market statistics from Florida Realtors show that July was another rocky month for existing home sales in Florida. Closed sales of single-family homes were down almost 23% year-over-year, while condo and townhouse sales were down nearly 31%. However, I've been saying all year, of course, that it's almost not fair to compare 2022 sales numbers to those from a year ago because 2021 was such a uniquely good year for the housing market, with the 30-year mortgage rate hovering near 3% the entire year. But we should also acknowledge that this July, we saw fewer home sales than we did in July of 2019, before the pandemic. This year's high mortgage rates, combined with a continuation of last year's rapid rise in home prices have really put the brakes on the number of completed transactions this summer.
If not for those two factors, it would be safe to say that buyer demand would be booming in Florida right now. Demographically, Florida is in a great position, with the bulk of the state's millennials moving into the prime age for first-time home purchases, not to mention the high level of interest in Florida among out-of-state buyers, whether they be investors, retirees, or untethered workers. Rents around the state have increased substantially, as well, so it's not as though renting has become more attractive relative to buying. But we simply can't ignore the impact that these higher mortgage rates and home prices are having on the market, and we should expect the number of transactions to suffer as a result over the next several months.
Fortunately, it's likely that we've now seen the worst of the increases in mortgage rates. In fact, they've been somewhat down from their recent highs, although they still remain elevated well above last year's record-low levels, and home sale prices have finally started to react. The median sale price for closed single-family home sales in Florida was up over 16% year-over-year in July, to just north of $412,000 - but notably, this was the smallest percentage increase we've seen since January of 2021. The median price for condo and townhouse sales, meanwhile, was up by 20.6% to $305,000--a larger percentage increase than on the single-family side, for sure, but still the smallest one for condo and townhouse sales since last November.
Perhaps the most interesting development in Florida's housing market in July, however, was a pullback in new listings. In the single-family category, new listings were only up 3.3% year-over-year, a significant downshift from May and June, when they were up over 10% and 13%, respectively. By comparison, new listings of condos and townhouses were only up by 3.4% in May and 4.7% in June, but they actually *fell* by 7.3% in July. So it would appear that, now that prices are finally adjusting to current market conditions, new listings are responding in kind. End-of-month inventory levels continued to rise for both property type categories in July compared to the end of June, but due to the decline in new listing activity, these increases were smaller than the increases we saw from the end of May to the end of June. We are still quite a ways off from having inventory levels comparable to what we had in the pre-pandemic market, but we continue to move back in that direction, at least for now.
In the meantime, though, we have plenty of other data to analyze and sift through, so be sure to check out your local numbers at sunstats.floridarealtors.org. Even within your local market, there are likely a few cities or ZIP Codes that are bucking the statewide trends we've discussed here today. So make sure to spend some time in SunStats to get the most accurate read you can on your market! See you next month!