Last week we focused our attention on the condo market and today we will drill down on the housing market for the Greater Fort Lauderdale area.  We will show a few charts to provide an update on median sale prices, transaction types, inventory, foreclosures and distressed sales.  Let’s get moving!

Housing market – Median sale prices in Greater Fort Lauderdale

During the month of March, the median sale prices of short sales and foreclosures dropped more than traditional transactions.  here are the numbers:

• Median price for traditional sales – $320,000 down 1% from $323,250 in February
• Median foreclosure prices declined 10% from $230,250 in February to $207,557 in March
• Median short sale prices declined 6% from $215,000 in February to $202,750 in March

Existing inventory of single-family homes

Last month the existing inventory of houses for sale in Broward County dropped from 5,988 in February to 5,814 in March.  That is a decline of 174 houses, or about 3%.  We have sounded the alarm on the ballooning condo inventory, but the inventory of houses remains in check for now.

Monthly foreclosure filings

The pace of new foreclosure filings has been climbing in 2016.  The average monthly foreclosure filings was 220 in 2015 and is now 326 through April of this year.

Existing foreclosures in the Greater Fort Lauderdale area

As of our last count on April 1st, there 19,262 houses in some stage of foreclosure throughout Broward County.  This does not include the 4,585 condo properties in foreclosure.

New foreclosure filings and distressed sales

This next chart shows an interesting correlation between the pace of new foreclosure filings and the number of distressed sales closing on a monthly basis.  There is a disturbing trend developing and we haven’t seen foreclosures higher than distressed sales in years.  We don’t have the April sales numbers yet, but this development is worth monitoring.