October Jupiter Florida Real Estate market update 2023

Jupiter Florida Real Estate market update

Let’s start out with a broad view for a moment to give some context. On a national level sales fell to a 7 month low. What is keeping buyers on the sidelines nationally, are the same reasons locally.  Limited supply of inventory (buyers have fewer choices), higher sales prices (some people are just priced out of the market), and rising interest rates (don’t fight the fed, this has been a real killer, more than anything else as we had less inventory for sale during covid vs now locally).

Specific to the state of Florida the insurance marketplace is hampering deals.  That is to say the cost of the insurance and the condition the home must be in so that a buyer can obtain insurance (especially the roof age)

In short what’s good for sellers is bad for Buyers.  Limited inventory, with stable to rising home prices.  The big question is at some point does that reverse? I don’t see significant distress entering the market, but I do think there are sellers who now have plenty of equity who will just want to, not need to, want to, sell.

Single Family Homes. This data is going to be from the period of September 1 to September 30, data was compiled and distributed on October 16, 2023.  A note here.  If you’ve listened to me, or read my blog, for any number of years, you know I’m a skeptic. I can’t match the figures up that the real estate association is providing, to sales on the MLS, using the report I showed last month.  While I had tried to use a format that compiles the data more succinctly, I think its best to switch back to the longer form format I had used before. I’m also going to switch over to screen shares, so here we go!

The agenda will be going over market data slides first for single family homes, then for condo and townhome sales, distribution of sales, clusters of where sales are occurring.

I’m going to switch over to a screen share here.

Let’s move from left to right starting with single family homes and then switching to condo’s and townhomes.  I’ll run through the same data sets for both.

Median price of single family homes was $892,500. If we look back to September of 2022 that figure was $752,000. So a year over year increase of 17%.

Closed Sales Single Family Homes. So this is going to be one of the most important data points, how many homes are actually selling.  You can tune out a lot of other noise, but you can’t tune this out.  52 sales took place.  If we look back to September of 2022 there were 69 sales.  So a decrease here of 28%. Let’s take a look at how concerning that is by taking a wider 5 year view. I think this gives some real context here.  We’re basically at 5 year lows with a chart that’s pointing straight down.  Sellers take some real note here.  This isn’t good data for you.

So we’re looking at rising prices and declining sales. That’s not normally what happens in supply and demand environments right? We will see how this plays out, but it’s definitely an anomaly.

List to sales gives a good indication as to how realistic sellers are being at the time of list with pricing, and if they’re giving concessions to get deals done.  For buyers this shows how much, if any, you can reasonably expect to negotiate. 97.5% is a really strong figure. If we move out to the longer terms chart you can see we’re a bit above historical norms here. 

Median days is how many days a property was active on the MLS before it went pending.  This DOES NOT include the time it took to close.  Again, simply how many days it took to go from active to pending. We’re coming off some highs from earlier this year, but looks like we’re reversing and heading back upwards.  For Sellers this simply means it may take more time to sell your home than it has in recent years.

I’m going to skip over median psf, as much as I adore psf as a metric, I believe overall price is a better measure and we addressed that a minute ago

Total dollar volume, this another one to take a hard look at. Quick caveat, a handful of higher dollar sales can really skew this whole figure.  As we’ve only had 50 sales I’d take this with a grain of salt. If you look at this 5 year chart I think you can make an argument that $100 million is about the average here.  So I don’t think we’re far off.  That being said, it’s coming down from where it was.

Our final stop is months supply of inventory. Behind the total number of sales, months of inventory is my second favorite metric to look at when judging market health.  A quick primer, 6 months of supply is considered a balanced market favoring neither buyers nor sellers. Less than 6 months of supply favors sellers, more than 6 months favors buyers. 3 months of supply says we’re still in a sellers market. However, if we look at this longer term chart, Jupiter hasn’t seen 6 months of supply, this has been a long bull market for sellers. Again we recently came down from a high of 5 months, but it looks like we’re reversing back to the upside.

Lets switch over to condo and townhomes

Beginning with median sales price we slipped down from $609,000 to $500,000, a year over year decline just shy of 20%. If we zoom out on a 2 year chart we got to lows of $435,000, looks like we’re headed down there again, but we will see.

Sold listings, again, vital figures. From 58 sales down to 46, so another decline here of 23%. Let’s zoom out to the full 5 year view, we’re approaching lows. Not a bullish chart to be sure. So sellers take note here, this is a challenging environment for you, buyers also take note, if fewer sales are occurring this could give you more negotiating room knowing few other offers are likely coming in, just seems there aren’t a lot of buyers around right now.

List to sales we can kind of breeze through.  Looks like were right in historical norms here.

Days on market is interesting.  At this point can you assume that with list to sales at a relatively normal level, and days on market a bit above normal but heading down, that Sellers are already pricing their properties aggressively for sale?  At least the ones that are selling? Interesting things to keep an eye on.

Total sales volume year over year has taken a beating, down from $37 million to $27 million, a decline of 31% year over year.  The median sales price was down, total volume is down, so can we conclude that there are more deals happening on the lower end of the market and that’s what’s pulling these numbers down? We can answer that in a minute.

Months of supply, again here we see supply coming down, although its up over 40% year over year. Tailwind for Sellers and headwind for Buyers if this down trend continues.

Lets switch over to the sales by bracket slide

Here we go again, almost half of the total volume sold between $500-$750k.  This tells you that’s where most buyers are that are in the market.  Great if you’re a seller in this bracket, Buyers it means you may end up in a competitive bid process in this bracket.

Let’s say this another way.  Over 90% of sales took place below $1 million dollars.  This is where the Buyers are.  So if you’re thinking of listing at $1.1 million, is anyone going to see it? Is anyone searching in that price point? If you can’t make price work at $1 million, irrespective of appraised value, buyers simply may not be seeing your property because they’re not searching for that price bracket.

Keeping with the bracket theme but switching over to single family homes.  Let me know in the comments or call or email me if you think I should flow all the way through with single family and associated charts and data then switch and do the full set for condo’s and townhomes, I may switch this up as this seems a little disjointed.  I digress.

Single family home sales bracketed by price look like this; Much more evenly distributed than condo and townhomes right? So lets lump some of this together.  I recognize that a $10 million buyer isn’t looking at a $2 million property and vice versa, but, 28% of the sales taking place did so above $2 million. 23% of sales took place between $1 million and $ million. A whopping 55% of sales took place between $500,000 and $ 1 million making this our most active segment. Again though, a decent price distribution.

Here's the map view, as you can see pretty spread out, which is what you want to see honestly.

So that’s it.  If you learned something please like and subscribe to the channel.  Of course call, text or email me, let’s talk about some real estate!