Signs of Life: Home Prices Rise in Brevard

While other sectors of the housing market have seen Florida home loan demand and prices plummet, Brevard County has mostly remained steady. In May, however, the are saw edian resale prices rise for the second consecutive month - the first time that’s happened since August 2005.

Still, prices remain more than $20,000 below the August 2005 level, according to data released Tuesday by the Florida Association of Realtors. The group released a report talking about Florida home loans and prices in the region.

It covered:

Median prices: The median sales price rose 1.6 percent in May to $228,300. A year earlier, the median sales price was $227,900. The Brevard median price peaked at $248,700 in August 2005.

Sales volume: Single-family home sales in Brevard fell 25 percent in May, compared with the same period a year earlier, a sign of growing inventories and homes taking longer to sell. The Orlando-based Realtors group said there were 601 sales in May in Brevard, compared with 797 in May 2005. The demand for Florida home mortgage loans is a bit weak as buyers wait for prices to come down.

Michael Pruitt, president of Melbourne-based Pruitt Real Estate, said what some consider a slowdown in sales is really a “leveling off” to a more realistic real estate market.

“What we’re seeing is regular sales activity, not a feeding frenzy,” Pruitt said. “And, boy, there was a feeding frenzy.”

A buyer’s market: Get on that Florida home loan!

Lisa Dutcher Herendeen, a Melbourne-based real estate investor, said this is a good market for buyers.

“It is, in fact, a very good time to buy real estate,” Herendeen said. “Sellers have made their money. They have equity with which to negotiate. That does not mean that they need to drop their prices 20 percent, or certainly not 55 percent, but that there are bargaining opportunities at the selling table.”

Some sellers worry about getting the most they can from their housing investment, while buyers see some relief from escalating prices. Timothy Ridner, a licensed Florida real estate broker who moved to Brevard from the San Francisco area last year, said concerns about a real estate crash are overblown.

Ridner heard the same thing while a real estate broker in California.

“History has shown that, for the most part, these gloomy forecasts were wrong,” Ridner said. “People will still come to the sunshine and attractive climate. Even if growth forecasts are off by 30 percent, Florida is still going to see incredible future demand, compared with a lot of other areas of the country.”

In other words: buyers AND sellers should be okay. Whether you’re looking for a Florida home equity loan - or hoping to make a profit from a sale - the Sunshine State has you covered.