Today we will take a look at the Palm beach, Florida residential market with charts of average sale prices, transaction volume, inventory and distressed properties.  Our first chart shows the average sale prices of houses in South Florida and you will see that Palm Beach led the pack in April with an average selling price of $617,407 for single-family homes.

As for condos, Palm Beach prices climbed in April and reached $314,139, up 9% from the previous month.  Prices in Miami and Fort Lauderdale condos remained level to a slight increase.

Transaction volume had some strength in the last few months after a quiet start to 2018.  During the month of April, there were 1,690 house deals, up from 1,669 in March.  Mortgage rates were still very low at that point, so that may have served as a stimulus to get deals closed.

The condo market showed similar strength during the month of April.  In Palm Beach County there were 1,407 closed sales in the condo segment, up from 1,347 in March.  You will notice that condo property sales were on the upswing in Miami and Fort Lauderdale as well during the month of March.

As for the distressed property market, we have seen a steady climb in foreclosure filings since the FEMA hold expired.  Before foreclosures were placed on hold in August of 2017 (before Hurricane Irma), there were 332 residential foreclosure filings in Palm Beach County.  In May, we counted 320 new foreclosure filings so far and will update the number if it changes.

Here is a city-by city look at the existing foreclosures scattered throughout Palm Beach County.   We haven’t run this search in awhile, but the numbers have increased since we last conducted a search in 2016.  On today’s search, we found 14,010 houses and 2,327 condos in some stage of foreclosure scattered across Palm Beach County for a total of 16,337.  Take a look at the raw numbers, followed by a chart.

Here is a snapshot of our last few searches:

We had a short blip of lower mortgage rates for a week or so, but it looks like they may be heading higher again.  Check out this chart from Freddie Mac showing the latest mortgage rates.