Today we will take a look at how the single-family home market is doing in the Greater Fort Lauderdale / Broward County area.  First, let’s look at the median sale prices for traditional transactions, short sales and foreclosure/REO sales.

In April, the median sales prices for single-family homes in Broward County were as follows:

• Traditional sales –  $305,000, up from $288,500 in March
• Foreclosure sales – $160,000, down from $168,300 in March
• Short sales – $185,000, down from $213,000 in March

How about if we combine the foreclosure and short sale transactions and compare them to the new foreclosure actions being filed against delinquent borrowers?  In April there were 1,789 new foreclosure filings in the single-family home market in Broward, but only 354 distressed sales.  basically, there were five times as many new foreclosure filings as distressed sales!  Even more disturbing in the next chart is that there hasn’t been a single month over the past two years where there were more distressed sales than foreclosure filings.

How are we going to reduce the massive shadow inventory of foreclosures if the pace of distressed sales remains at just a small fraction of the new foreclosure filings?   Here is a city-by-city look at where over 45,000 houses in foreclosure are located throughout Broward County, Florida.  Just click on the chart to get a detailed look.

Finally, our last chart illustrates how the pace of new filings appears to be in an uptrend.  remember that we are just focusing on the single-family homes and have excluded the condo ad townhouse properties from the chars.  In 2014, the monthly average of new foreclosure filings has already surpassed the 2013 monthly average.  Is this single-family data indicative of a housing recovery?  A true housing recovery will require a strong foundation and hat foundation has yet to appear.  If you peel back a few layers and read beyond the headlines, you will notice the cracks in the foundation and notice that plenty of people in South Florida are still (5-6 years after the bust) not paying their mortgages.

• 2012 monthly average of new foreclosure filings was 953
• 2013 monthly average of new foreclosure filings was 1,624
• So far in 2014, the monthly average of new foreclosure filings is 1,647