The Hot Property Blog

With the latest news on the real estate market reflecting the bad news, we want to highlight some of the more positive statistics that are local to the Orlando area.

It is often easy to make the mistake of inferring the national statistics on your local real estate market. For example, the reports that home closings nationally were down 27% in July to a 15 year low do not reflect what is occurring on the ground here in Orlando.

Orlando area closings totaled just under 2400 during July, and although these were down from the strong June numbers, July 2010 figures were up compared to July 2009.

But here is even better news…closings of resales over the last 12 months have totaled over 28,800. Resale inventory is down to just under 16,600 homes, representing about a seven month supply. So there are buyers out there, many of them, and they are eating up much of the excess inventory that has flooded the market over the past three years.

Now compare the 28,800 figure to the previous two 12 month periods, where resale closings only just reached 20,000 for each period, and we will see sales have gone up!

But that’s not all, add to these resale closings another 5,600 ‘new home’ sales and this brings the total home closings to 34,400 over the last year.

The average ‘days on market’ has stayed consistently lower over the last few months at 85 days, comparing this to last Julys figure of 101 days.

If we look at the unemployment numbers; statewide, the unemployment rate for Florida currently stands at 12.0%, with 1.1 million persons out of work. The Orlando area looks a bit better with an unemployment rate of 11.7%, but this is still not a good number. So where is the good news in this? For the past five consecutive months the Orlando area has added jobs. As of July, total employment stood at 998,100 persons, up 28,300 since February. This represents a steady growth in employment!

Yes, prices of homes are down. The median price of a home in the Orlando area currently stands at $109,900, compared to $133,000 for July last year. This represents a 17.37% drop from last year; however the drop in prices for the last two 12 month periods was 36.06% (at July 2009) and 21.34% (at July 2008). We have seen this price depreciation slow up with June 2010 at 12.33%, and both April & May at 11.54%. Yes, we agree with the statistic…prices are low!

Finally, the last statistic speaks for itself. The average mortgage interest rate stands at the lowest level since they started keeping records! Take a look at the chart below… 

To summarize, for the Orlando real estate market, prices have fallen (with the bulk of the price depreciation happening last year) to where they are attractively low. Low enough to where we have seen sales increase, inventory has fallen, and homes are selling quicker.

With the lowest mortgage rate currently on record, if you are looking to buy right now the Orlando area statistics suggest it is an attractive time to buy!