It looks like condo/townhouse prices may have peaked in August in the Fort Lauderdale /  Broward County real estate market. Take a look at our first chart of the average selling price.

The average selling price dropped to $149,760 in September.  That represents an 11% slide from $168,461 in August.  That is good news for buyers, along with the available inventory climbing 5% from August, now at 6,430 condo/townhouse units available for sale in September, up from 6,152 in August.  Our next chart shows the available inventory and you will notice that after dropping for the past few years, it is finally on the upswing.

What types of transactions are closing?  Here is a breakdown of the 1,252 sales that closed in September, followed by a chart:

• 872 condo/townhouse sales were traditional transactions, which accounted for 70% of all sales
• 208 sales were Foreclosure / REO sales, making up 16% of all closings
• 172 were short sale transactions that were 14% of all closings

Now for the distressed condo/townhouse stats in Broward County.  It doesn’t appear that the pace of foreclosure filings will be slowing anytime soon.  New filings more than doubled from 288 in August to 626 in September.  So far through 2013, the new filings average 522 per month, up from 379 in 2012.

Next, let’s look at the pace of new foreclosure filings, compared to the amount of distressed sales (combine the month REO and short sales).

There is a noticeable divergence in the figures.  The chart above shows how there were 626 new foreclosure filings in the condo/townhouse market in September, but only 380 distressed sales.  This trend needs to reverse if we ever want to dispose of the over 16,000 condo/townhouse properties throughout Broward County that are in some stage of foreclosure.

The total count as of 16,347 as of October 21, 2013.  It is important to keep in mind that this does not include the over 50,000 single-family homes in foreclosure in Broward.  Some of the cities with elevated levels (over 1,000) of condo/townhouse properties in foreclosure are:

• Fort Lauderdale – 1,269 condo / townhouse properties in some stage of foreclosure
• Pompano Beach – 1,276 condo / townhouse properties in some stage of foreclosure
• Hollywood – 1,266 condo / townhouse properties in some stage of foreclosure
• Coral Springs – 1,364 condo / townhouse properties in some stage of foreclosure
• Lauderhill – 1,261 condo / townhouse properties in some stage of foreclosure
• Tamarac – 1,116 condo / townhouse properties in some stage of foreclosure
• Miramar – 1,019 condo / townhouse properties in some stage of foreclosure

Basically, there is not one city in Broward County that is immune to this foreclosure problem and the local real estate market will not begin a sustainable recovery until these foreclosures are processed through the courts and sold on the market.  When you combine over 50,000 houses and over 16,000 condo / townhouses in foreclosure, that is a sizeable overhang.  Don’t get too excited about a “housing recovery” until we see a significant drop in this shadow inventory.