Orlando Real Estate Outlook: Not Good
Benjaimal Sukhram’s home-for-sale listing recently expired after six months. Not one person came to see his Lake County house during that 180 days, much less make an offer to buy it.
But the Clermont resident signed up Monday with a different Realtor, ready to try again. He has plenty of company.
A record 26,313 homes and condos were listed for sale last month just in the core Orlando housing market, up another 295 listings from the month before, according to records kept by the Orlando Regional Realtor Association. And thousands more are on the market as for-sale-by-owner properties.
Only 1,343 homes and condos sold during August in the core market, which consists primarily of Orange and Seminole counties. That’s a decrease of 40.3 percent from a year ago, the local Realtors reported Monday.
The median sales price for those properties was down 2 percent to $245,000 compared with August 2006 - the third time this year that the monthly median has fallen from a year earlier.
If that continues, it could set the stage for a rare, year-over-year decline in existing-home prices for Orlando of perhaps 1 percent or 2 percent. The National Association of Realtors, meanwhile, is forecasting a 6.8 percent drop in resale prices nationwide this year, on top of an 8.5 percent decline last year.
This is great news for hopeful Florida mortgage borrowers, of course.
For homeowners such as the 58-year-old Sukhram, a native of Guyana who lived in New York for many years, the softness of the once-hot Central Florida real estate market continues to astonish and dismay.
“I’m waiting and waiting, and it’s frustrating,” he said.
The properties sold in August spent an average of 108 days on the market, the local Realtors group reported, the first time in 31/2 years that the average wait has exceeded 100 days.
Although the local median price is still roughly double what it was in 2001, the pace of existing-home sales so far this year has slipped back to levels last seen seven years ago, and the current slowdown is beginning to more closely resemble the historic boom in its potential to be a historic bust.
