Healthy High-End Housing Market in Florida
Florida has been hit hard lately. Not by hurricanes - but by falling home sales and prices in this former hot market for speculators. Homes in the $10 million-plus category, however, seem to be weathering the storm.
Existing single-family home sales in Florida were down 30% in November, 2006, from the previous November, according to the Florida Association of Realtors. The statewide existing-home median price fell 3%, to $242,500 in November, 2006, from $250,400 a year earlier.
These statistics place Florida among the worst-affected by the national housing market correction, which pushed existing home sales down to a rate of 6.28 million in November, 2006, 10.7% below the November, 2005 pace.
Florida housing market future
The year ahead is not looking much brighter for the Sunshine State. The statewide median sales price, evidence of the frenzied runup in prices in the first half of the decade, is still 88.3% higher than it was in November, 2001, when investors swarmed Florida’s plentiful shoreline.
By economic law, the areas that had the most rapid price runups will see the sharpest price declines in 2007. According to financial data processor Fiserv Lending Solutions, the Miami housing market, with an estimated decline of 9.16%, is expected to see the second-worst 2007 price drop out of all the country’s metro areas.
Survival of the richest
The Realtors at Premier Estate Properties, however, never worry about gloomy statistics or predictions. Florida’s highly desirable Gold Coast - the region running along the eastern shoreline from Palm Beach to Miami - had six $10 million-plus home sales in 2006.
The Boca Raton brokerage, which exclusively markets and sells estate properties in South Florida priced in excess of $1 million to Florida mortgage applicants, was involved in five of the six.
“It was a really big year, higher than normal in our market,” says Premier Estates Realtor-owner Joseph Liguori. “The $13 million-and-above category began heating up in the last quarter.”
With the stock market picking up, the wealthy and well-invested are reaping sizable profits and putting that into real estate, Liguori says. His buyers in the superluxury home class last year included Europeans (Russian and English) motivated by the weak dollar and Americans looking to “trade up” to a fancier house, like Liguori’s $22.5 million, 23,800 square-foot Italian-style villa in Boca Raton.
Over on Florida’s west coast, which is traditionally less popular with Northeasterners, luxury buyers are also younger people using fresh earnings from financial service jobs, according to Michael Moulton, a Realtor with Michael Saunders & Co. in the Sarasota housing market.
“There’s a lot of Wall Street money coming down,” he says. Although the first six months of the year were “a little slow,” Moulton notes that Michael Saunders was involved in two of the biggest transactions in Sarasota County last year, including the sale of a home for $5.5 million
