Ramesh Nyberg's Real Estate Blog

Just in time for me to talk to my friends Brian Lewis and Joe Desanti on their Circle Mortgage Radio show Sunday morning, the April sales data came out. Every month, when the new stats are published, you've been reading about the Miami-Dade single family homes market getting better and better. Well now, Pinecrest and Palmetto Bay have their own numbers to boast about.

The charts on these two municipalities have meandered lately, but look at what's happened now:  (you can click on "$ales by the Numbers", to the left)
Pinecrest- 9 sales in January, 10 in February, 16 in March, and 23 (the highest in over 14 months) in April. Just as impressive, the inventory dropped for the second straight month, down to 265.
Palmetto Bay - 19 sales in January, 16 in February, 26 in March, and a whopping 31 sales in April. The inventory there has gone pretty steadily down since August of last year, when it was 305, down to only 199 last month.

The county overall continued to improve in dramatic fashion. This patient was being given CPR a year a half ago. It's sitting up in bed and talking now:
7 straight months of decreasing inventory, down to 11,936 unsold (single family) properties, and its 5 straight month of increasing sales, with 1425 in April.

Remember, when listening to stats on CNN, MSNBC, and the like, that these are national statistics they are giving you. The experts have been telling us for a couple of years that when the market turns, look to destination places like South Florida to lead the charge, and that's what appears to be happening.

I had a very good sign on all this personally delivered to me last week in the form of an offer (which we went to full contract on over the weekend) on a Kendall townhouse I've been trying to sell for eight months now. The good sign was not just that we went to contract, but we did so at a very good price. We had just lowered it from $199,000 to $180,000.

The case in point here is that when you adjust a price downward, you are not "giving the place away", you are searching for--and hopefully finding--that energy point that sparks buyers to purchase in that specific area. Each neighborhood has a particular price per square foot (within $10-12) that most sales (distressed foreclosures excluded) will end up at. Your Realtor's responsibility is to continously analyze the market trends in your area, and counsel you on what's been selling and for how much.