We have plenty of new data for the South Florida residential real estate market including available inventory for sale, price trends and distressed property shadow inventory for the single-family home and the condo/townhouse market.  First, let’s look at a chart of the existing inventory for sale.

Nothing really new here, just a slight dip in single-family home inventory from 17,299 in June to 15,658 in July.  As far as condo/townhouse inventory, there were 20,307 units available for sale in June and 19,733 in July.  After foreclosures were halted by the major banks in late 2010 for the robo-signing litigation, the available inventory started to slide and has yet to recover.  How about the average selling prices?

There was a rather substantial dip in single-family home sale prices from $427,299 in June to $380,674 in July.  The average sale price in the condo/townhouse segment was $246,083 in June and $232,199 in July.

What types of transactions are closing in South Florida?

Here is the single family summary for July:

• Traditional sales are still the majority at 70% of all single-family closings for a total of 2,932
• Foreclosure/REO sales were 13% of all single-family sales with a total of 529 (up from 387 in June)
• Sort sales were 17% of single-family closings at 727 deals, up from 676 in June

As for condo/townhouse sales, here is the breakdown of closings by transaction type.

Here is the breakdown of condo/townhouse closings for July in South Florida:

• There were 2,865 traditional transactions in July, making up 70% of all closings
• 719 foreclosure/REO deals closed in July for about 17% of closings, the total was up from 561 in June
• 528 short sales closed in July, making up 13% of the total number of closings, down slightly from June

Now for some fun!  Here is a quick glance at the shadow inventory of distressed properties in South Florida.  We did a quick search of the tri-county area in the beginning of August and we found 136,740 residential properties in some satge in foreclosure.  Keep in mind that we are limited to 5,000 results when we do our city-by-city searches and many cities are “maxed-out” at the 5,000 limit.  With that being said, the shadow inventory could easily exceed 150,000 properties.

This is a massive inventory of distressed properties that need to be cleared through the system.   The pace of new foreclosures took a quick break in July, but will most likely ramp back up in August and remain strong through the remainder of 2013.

For the remainder of 2013 and into 2014, the South Florida residential real estate market will continue to be under pressure from rising mortgage rates and the steady flow of distressed properties finally getting placed on the market for sale.  It sure looks like the month of May was the “top-tick” in prices for the South Florida residential property market.  In our final chart today, take a look at the rise in mortgage rates in June through July, then scroll back up to look at the chart of the average selling prices.  This is not a coincidence!  The rise in borrowing costs will continue to impact sale prices. going forward.