Article: South Florida Home Prices Continue To Drop

At the beginning of this week, the Miami Herald provided its latest update on property prices. In an article published this past Monday, the newspaper detailed a recent report from the Florida Association of Realtors.

Overall, and what will come as a suprise to very few, year on year prices have gone down, rather substantially. From July 2007 to July 2008, prices of houses in Dade county dropped by 14%. In Broward, this figure was 19%. For condos, there was a bigger drop in prices: 19% in Dade and 26% in Broward.

Median house prices are now at $322,700 for Dade and $303,600 for Broward. Median prices for condos are $230,700 for Dade and $138,300 for Broward. As an interesting side point, take a closer look at that last sentence. The median price of a Broward condo is almost $100,000 less than a Dade condo!

No matter how falling house prices can be used to the advantage of some - such as by bagging yourself a bargain - we all want to hear of some upturn, right? The Herald reports that the number of homes that are on the market has levelled, possibly indicating a combination of fewer foreclosures, less new instructions and more sales. There is still, however, a huge supply; for example, there's a 41-month supply of condos in Dade county. (A normal level would be six to twelve month supply.)

In terms of numbers of sales, there has actually been a slight increase in Broward. Sales of houses has gone up 4% from July 2007 to July 2008; condo sales have "only" dropped by 1%.

Comparatively, for the whole country, sales have gone up by 3.1% in the same period.

Article: South Florida home prices continue to drop (25th August 2008, The Miami Herald)