The data for the 1st quarter of 2013 is in the bag, so let’s have some fun with charts relating to the Broward County, Florida  condo & townhouse market.  The first chart we will review is the existing condo and townhouse inventory for sale.

Inventory has declined moth over month, dropping to only 6,089 units available for sale in March.  There was a spike in available properties at the beginning of the year in January, but all of that excess inventory was quickly gobbled-up.  Next, let’s look at the breakdown of transaction types.

It is obvious from this chart that the distressed properties are a very small portion of closed transactions.  foreclosures and short sales each made up about 15% of all transactions and traditional sales were the remaining 70% of closed sales in March.

New foreclosure filings on condo/townhouse properties keep plugging along, with 304 new filings in March.  If you take an average over the last 15 months since January 2012, the monthly average of new filings is 362.  Now that all of the robo-signing litigation has been settled, the monthly filings will most likely remain steady and may actually increase for the remainder of 2013.

As for where all of the existing foreclosures are t throughout Broward County, here is a breakdown by City.

Some cities with the highest level of condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure, here are some of the numbers.  As our April 26, 2013 there were 16,103 condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure in Broward County and below are some of the cities with over 1,000:

• Fort Lauderdale –  2,495 condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure
• Coral Springs – 1,407  condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure
• Hollywood – 1,330 condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure
• Pompano – 1,317  condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure
• Tamarac – 1,026 condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure
• Miramar – 1,010 condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure
• Pembroke Pines – 1,009 condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure

Finally, to put everything into perspective, let’s display the amount of listed inventory compared to the shadow inventory:

Given the percentage of closed sales from last month and assuming that 30% of the existing condo/townhouse inventory is “distressed”, this what the breakdown looks like.   There were 6,089 units listed for sale.  If 30% of them are REO or short sale listings, that means 1,827 listings are distressed sales.  That number is a small fraction of the 16,103 units currently in foreclosure throughout Broward County (roughly 11%).  In March there were a total of 463 distressed sales closed when you combine the 237 foreclosure/REO deals and 226 short sales.  At that rate, it would take 35 months, or let’s just say three years to dispose of the 16,103 condo/townhouses in foreclosure in Broward County.  Oh wait, we forgot to add back the monthly average of 362 new condo foreclosure filings each month.  Well, the monthly distressed condo/townhouse sales barely offset the new foreclosure filings, so that may drag this out longer than we initially thought!

In any event, the recent lack of supply has provided an opportunity for condo/townhouse owners to fetch a higher price than they have seen in the past few years, but that is a temporary situation until the shadow inventory gets released.  As more distressed properties hit the market over the next year or two, prices will once again resume their downtrend.  Distressed properties typically sell at a discount of about 20% to the market, so when they occur in a condo building, it usually impacts the value of the remaining units.