We have plenty of new residential real estate market data through the month of May, so let’s run through a few charts to see how things are shaping up.  Our first chart today shows the inventory of houses and condo properties listed for sale in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County, Florida.  This month there were a total of 44,310 residential properties for sale in the tri-county area when you combine the 19,190 single-family homes and 25,120 condo properties that are currently available for sale.

Next, let’s look at the pace of new foreclosure filings compared to the total number of closed transactions.  Luckily over the past few months the total number of transactions has outpaced the new foreclosure filings.  In May, there were 2,838 closed sales and 2,096 new foreclosure actions filed in South Florida.

As for how the three counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County are looking when we count the new foreclosure filings, we saw a slight dip in Broward and Palm Beach in the month of May, but Miami-Dade saw an increase.

How about the pace of distressed sales?  Well, it’s safe to say that if we ever want to reduce the massive shadow inventory of foreclosures in South Florida, we will need to pick-up the pace of short-sales and REO transactions.  In may there were 6,136 new foreclosure filings, but only 2,128 distressed sales.   Yes, there were three times as many new foreclosure filings in South Florida than distressed sales during the month of May.  Short sales haven’t been as popular since the mortgage forgiveness debt relief act expired at the end of 2013.  If those borrowers haven’t floated out of negative equity with the recent price increases, they will just be added to the pipeline of properties in foreclosure.  Don’t forget that since Florida is a judicial state, the average foreclosure takes 1,095 days!

Maybe such a slow pace of distressed sales is a reason why prices have been rising recently.  The average sale price of a single-family home rose to $481,218 and the average sale price of a condo/townhouse property climbed to $278,694 in May.  Maybe this last chart should have been titled:  “Housing Bubble 2.0!”