Prime Time for Buyers Seeking a South Florida Home Loan

As the weather warms up and the Florida home loan market cools down slightly, South Florida buyers are in a prime position. Around the area, home owners are doing what would have been unthinkable six months earlier:

- They’re slashing the asking price of their houses, townhomes and condos in order to lure in those seeking a home loan - even throwing in incentives for home sales, from a canoe to adding granite kitchen counters to helping pay the buyer’s closing costs.

The Florida Board of Realtors reports that prices of homes were lower in February than in January in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, although both counties still enjoyed double-digit increases from a year ago.

A shift in the Florida housing market

Sellers are still making money, especially if they had owned their homes five years ago, when prices began rising to record levels. The bubble hasn’t burst yet in South Florida’s once red-hot housing market. But in the last few months, the market has begun shifting to buyers, who have more than double the number of homes to choose from than they did a year ago.

”The market has definitely shifted,” says Keyes real estate agent Luisa Mackay. “Nowadays, there is so much more inventory.”

Real estate agents are having to work harder, holding more open houses, for example, to sell homes, she says. They’re urging clients to list their homes at a competitive price.

For Mackay’s clients who are trying to sell a four-bedroom, five-bath Miami Lakes home, that meant pricing it thousands of dollars less than other lakefront homes for sale in the neighborhood. Still, the buyers are asking $995,000, a price that would have been unthinkable even a couple of years ago.

”The prices are dropping but they are still up. People are still making money,” says Freddy Bolivarmadriz, a real estate agent at Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell.

Still, Philip J. Spiegelman, chairman of the International Sales Group, which represents dozens of condo developers, estimates prices will be up an average 7 percent in 2006 from 2005. Others are estimating 4 to 10 percent.

Spiegelman says his firm has that condominium complexes now under construction in South Florida have already sold most of their units.

However, he says the current market is likely to discourage many from building additional condos in the near future — even if they have done pre-construction sales — because they would lose money, because of spiraling construction costs.

A new selling approach; Receive incentives on your Florida home loan

Even apartments being turned into condominiums have been affected. Many developers are resorting to creative incentives to lure buyers. The Marquesa condominium in Pembroke Pines recently was giving away a 27-month lease on a Jeep Liberty with any purchase of a two-bedroom unit.

Reflecting the recent steep increases in home prices, many buyers are looking for homes that they can share with other family members, to split the hefty Florida home loan payments, Keyes real estate agent César Martinez says.

He had no trouble selling a three-bedroom duplex in Hialeah that was across the street from a factory.

Two generations of a family pounced on the house within two weeks of it going on the market, because it provided space for two families. They agreed to pay $318,500, just 2 percent less than the asking price of $325,000, Martinez says.

Other sellers are offering incentives to attract buyers. One family in Pinecrest offered to throw in a canoe, while a Pembroke Pines couple is installing granite counters and wood kitchen cabinets to make their five-bedroom lakeside home more desirable. Whatever it takes to make sure others agree on terms for a Florida home loan.