Has Florida Real Estate Market Hit Bottom?
There’s a bit of promising news in the housing market in the Jacksonville area. Local property owners and potential home buyers may be encouraged to hear that the real estate market outlook for this northeast Florida metro area is one of the best in the state. Keep your fingers crossed folks, that the worst of the housing market is behind us.
“Results of the first quarter survey indicate that the real estate market in Florida has hit bottom and is in the process of stabilizing across most property types,” a conclusion reached in Florida’s first quarter 2010 “Survey of Emerging Market Conditions,” published by The Bergstrom Center for Real Estate Studies at the University of Florida.
“Jacksonville, in particular, is in a good position because its housing market never got as hot as other markets, and as a result, it doesn’t have as many foreclosures. Jacksonville, Florida is primed to really take off, and with the expansion of the port is going to have a lot of jobs coming into the marketplace,” said Timothy Becker, director of UF’s Bergstrom Center for Real Estate Studies, according to a University of Florida news article dated April 28, 2010.
It’s not all fair weather in Florida, though. Hovering dark clouds for the state include Florida’s high unemployment rate and the state’s lack of debt capital, according to the Florida survey analysis.
The survey’s conclusion puts forth a caveat: “Certainly, only time will tell if we have truly turned a corner and have started on the long rough road up the growth curve. But a few rays of sunshine are better than none.”
Florida Beach Home. Oceanfront Living.
JACKSONVILLE REAL ESTATE BROKERAGE REPORTS APRIL 2010 BEST SALES MONTH IN ALMOST FOUR YEARS
Florida Times-Union columnist and blogger, Abel Harding, recently interviewed the president and CEO of Prudential Network Realty of Jacksonville, Florida (one of the biggest real estate firms in northeast Florida with seven branch offices). This real estate brokerage company reportedly just had the best month in real estate sales in almost four years. “The month of April was the 250-agent company’s best month in open sales and volume since June 2006,” according to Harding’s column, read more at Jacksonville.com. One could view this as some validation in the actual realty marketplace of the scholars’ research survey’s forecasts mentioned above.
Another positive development has been a reported improvement in property appraisals, according to the interview. For those unfamiliar, appraisal reports have been a thorny issue, and more frequently a deal breaker in recent years with falling home values. A dreaded gap often arises when an appraisal comes in too low, causing deals to fall apart after the buyer and seller have reached agreement on the sales price and signed a sales contract. Trying to agree to new terms (i.e. the seller eating the difference by accepting a lower price) is sometimes an exercise in futility. There’s been complaints that the appraisals are sometimes being farmed out by the banks to appraisers not familiar with the local market, so some feel the accuracy is questionable.
Interested in more local real estate news and views? See Amelia Island Living’s Florida Real Estate “FUTURE-CAST:” Home Price Trend Data,” article published in April, here’s an excerpt:
There’s the good news and the bad news in the housing market here in northeast Florida. Jacksonville’s housing market is projected to improve ahead of almost all other markets in the state of Florida (except for two, reportedly). The bad news is industry experts are predicting Jacksonville area home prices won’t return to their former peak levels (the peak prices formerly hit in 2006) for about another ten years — that is, 2020.
Hitting the price “trough” in the Jacksonville area is projected to take place during second quarter of 2011, so about another year. Fiserv estimates Jacksonville area housing prices will have dropped around 39% at the trough from the peak prices of 2006. But, it could be a lot worse — Florida-wise, that is.
Looking at the glass half full instead of empty, the Jacksonville area residential real estate market will return to better health in advance of most other cities in the Sunshine State, or so predicts the folks at Fiserv. (For those unfamiliar, Amelia Island, located in Nassau County, Florida, north of Jacksonville, is part of the Jacksonville MSA — Metropolitan Statistical Area). Amelia Island Living April 15, 2010…Read this article…
MORE ABOUT BERGSTROM RESEARCH
The Bergstrom Center for Real Estate Studies at the University of Florida publishes “The Survey of Emerging Market Condition,” a quarterly report. It’s the only Florida-centered survey of leaders and professional advisors in the real estate industry. The survey analyzes prospective data to produce extensive forecasting information. According to the Center, the number of participants is 278, described as “the most extensive survey of Florida professional real estate analysts and investors conducted on an ongoing basis.”
