In one word:  YES!  It looks like the latest bubble in South Florida residential real estate may be deflating right before our eyes. Today will just be a quick update while we await the latest data, but some of these charts paint a good picture of what is really happening in the single-family home and condo/townhouse market in South Florida.   Take a look at the recent downtrend in sale prices.

If you just go back to June, the average sale price of a single-family home in South Florida was $427,299 and slipped to $352,917 in September.  As far as condo/townhouse sales, the average selling price was $246,083 in June and  $222,157 in September.

There is a change in the types of transactions closing as well.  Look at this next chart to see the traditional sales of single-family homes began falling off a cliff in June from 2,957 that month to 2,488 in September.

In the condo/townhouse market, it looks like the top-tick was in May at 3,586 traditional sales and the figure dropped to 2,465 traditional sales in September.

So what do we have to look forward to?  Let’s take a look at the pace of new foreclosure filings in South Florida and breakdown the data for Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County.

So far in 2013, there have been over 67,000 new foreclosure filings in the tri-county area, which averages 6,700 per month throughout 2013 (aka the year of the housing recovery).  In 2012 there were 48,633 new filings for a monthly average of  4,053. That amounts to a 66% percent increase in the monthly average of new foreclosure filings from 2012 to 2013.  As for the October breakdown by County, here it is:

• Miami-Dade County had 1,605 houses and 1,163 condo/townhouse properties enter the foreclosure process
• Broward County had 1,742 houses and 631 condo/townhouses enter the foreclosure process
• Palm Beach County had 694 houses and 190 condo/townhouses enter the foreclosure process

As you will notice from the chart, Broward County had a slight increase over September, but Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County showed a significant rise in new foreclosure filings.  Stay tuned, and we will be updating the latest price trends, transaction types and shadow inventory figures over the next few weeks.