After receiving the latest single-family home inventory for the Broward County / Greater Fort Lauderdale market, it appears that we will be stuck in a low-inventory environment for awhile.  In March 2013, there were only 4,226 single-family homes available for sale in Broward County.

The slide in available inventory for sale started way back in October of 2010 when all of the major lenders put their foreclosures on hold due to the robo-signing litigation.  The crazy thing, is that in this record-low interest rate environment, you would think that we aould be seeing the average selling price jump more than we see in the next chart:

The average selling price of a single-family home actually dipped slightly from $307,385 in February to $297,341 in March.  Maybe the next chart of closed sales explains this better.

Although we saw an increase of traditional sales, there was an uptick in short sales closing.  There were 1,199 closed transactions for the month of March, and here is the breakdown by type of transaction:

• 788 closed sales were traditional sales (65.7% of all closings for the month)
• 139 were Foreclosure/REO transactions (11.6% of all closings for the month)
• 272 were short sales (22.7% of all closings for the month)

The increase in the short sales could very well be placing downward pressure on prices.  Most short sale (and REO) transactions sell at a discount to the current market.  As lenders begin to ramp-up the foreclosure activity in the wake of the national mortgage settlement, more delinquent borrowers will find it advantageous to short-sell their property rather than have it foreclosed on.   It is important to keep in perspective the impact that the robo-signing case had on slowing foreclosures over the past few years.  Not only is Florida #1 in “zombie foreclosures”, we also have a massive backlog of foreclosures that need to make their way through the court system.  As it stands now, the average foreclosure in Florida takes 853 days.  Here is a good snapshot thanks to Zerohedge and Realtytrac on the impact of the foreclosure halt and why inventories are so low right now:

Stay tuned!  We will continue to track the housing and condo market inventories, price trends and sale types for Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County, Florida.  In addition, we track the monthly foreclosure filings for South Florida as well as which cities have an elevated level of existing foreclosures.