Miami Condo Oversupply: A Problem for Florida Economy
In the middle of the biggest glut of condominiums in more than 30 years, Miami developers keep on building.
The oversupply will force prices down as much as 30 percent, the worst decline since the 1970s, and help push Florida’s economy into recession as early as October, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Economy.com, who owns a home in Vero Beach, Florida.
“Florida is the epicenter for all the problems that exist in the housing industry,” said Lewis Goodkin, president of Goodkin Consulting Corp. and a property adviser in the Miami housing market for the past 30 years, who also foresees a recession. “The problems we have now are unprecedented and a lot of people will get burnt.”
Thirty-seven new high-rise condos and 20,000 new units are being built in Miami’s 1,040-acre downtown, where sales fell almost 50 percent in May, according to the Florida Association of Realtors.
The new units will join the 22,924 existing Florida condos in Miami-Dade County that were for sale in April, according to Jack McCabe, chief executive officer of McCabe Research & Consulting LLC in Deerfield Beach. That’s the most unsold units since McCabe began tracking sales in 2002.
“Have you been to Miami lately?” Florida Governor Charlie Crist said at a homebuilders’ conference last week in Orlando. “It’s like we have a new state bird: the building crane.”
Construction Jobs
While the housing industry is responsible for 10.6 percent of the nation’s jobs, in Florida it accounts for 20 percent, Zandi said. Florida construction jobs fell 2.9 percent in May to 626,200 from the peak in June 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The national housing industry’s weakness prompted Federal Reserve policy makers this week to cut their forecasts for U.S. economic growth for the next two years.
The economy will grow by 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 from a year before, compared with a range of 2.5 percent to 3 percent the Fed predicted in February, the board said in a report to Congress.
Florida’s robust economy of 2001 to 2005 was driven by the thousands of well-paying jobs related to the real estate market and homeowners who used Florida home equity loans to pay for items such as boats and big-screen TVs, McCabe said.
“All those jobs are going away now, and we’re seeing the trickle-down effect in declining sales in big-box retailers and home-furnishing manufacturers,” McCabe said. “Florida is headed to a recession.”
Influx of Retirees
This recession could be averted and the state housing industry’s “serious problems” solved by an influx of American retirees and foreign Florida mortgage borrowers, said David Denslow, a University of Florida economist in Gainesville.
“The wave of baby boomer retirees is gathering momentum, and the weaker dollar makes Florida seem like a bargain to Europeans,” Denslow said. “With any luck at all that will sustain us.”
Downtown Miami developers already are offering incentives for brokers who connect them to buyers. John Rosser, president of the Key Biscayne, Florida-based John Paul Rosser & Associates Inc. estate brokerage, said he is usually paid a commission of as much as 5 percent when a sale is completed.
For the Capital at Brickell, a block off Miami’s Brickell Avenue, he was offered what he called “an unheard of” deal to steer buyers to one of the 832 units proposed. A salesman said Rosser would be paid 5 percent - payable when buyers put down a deposit. The project has just broken ground and won’t open until 2011.
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