Ramesh Nyberg's Real Estate Blog

The previous posts you've read here have been telling a story of a market starting to pick up steam again. You've also heard me take a swing or two at the news media, because they are so in love with the dark clouds I don't think they would know a silver lining if it bit them in the classified section.
All the stats show that the housing market is on the upswing. But the Herald simply could not resist printing something negative, so today dug up this fairly insignificant stat about new construction being down 14%. This should be no great surprise, should it? The economy, while it seems to be recovering, doesn't justify building more residential properties just yet. We haven't reached that tipping point yet where sales and new inventory are balanced, and prices can start to climb back up.

It's been really busy for me this past week, both at home and at work. I have had a closing delayed for over a week, with lots of conflict and uncertainty back and forth on both sides, so I was ready for a little relaxation this past weekend. 

On Friday, I attended the Saphire Ball Gala at the Biltmore, a fundraiser for KidsUnited.org. What a nice affair that was, with a big silent auction, and way too many servers walking around with free martinis (!). The food and music was real good too. Thank you, Dave Rudra, from Clean Image Corporation, for that invitation!

Saturday and Sunday, my daughter and wife both performed this weekend at the Divas of Dance Indian dance show at Miami-Dade College. It was great! It was the first time Linnea, who is now 5-1/2, had ever performed on a big stage like that, and she did so well.. I was really proud of her.

I just got a new listing yesterday, so that's keeping me hopping, and tomorrow night I am hosting my monthly Networking Happy Hour at Hops. If you or anyone you know are in business of ANY kind and could use some new referral business, this is a really fun and relaxing way of doing it. I'll put them on the e-vite list for next month. We have a good time. This time, Enrique Colls, my photographer friend, will be there to take pictures and I will post them both here and on Facebook. I am really looking forward to that--with any luck, we'll have the closing the same day.

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.

I think the cool weather is finally over. When the mangoes start looking good, that seems to be the indicator, right? And the mango trees are full. 

I wasn't sure when I would be saying this again, but it is starting to look like a good time to get your home on the market, if you need to sell. I'm still telling people that if you don't have to, then don't. But if it's a time for that lifestyle change, retirement home, whatever it is, then the stats I've been talking about the last few months are telling us that summer might be real good.

I'm not saying the asking prices are on the rise--there is still a significant amount of inventory and we haven't reached that tipping point yet. But if you need to sell, I'm saying now, as the serious summer buyers start their searches. They'll want to be closed and moved in before the next school year starts.

If you happen to be on Twitter, you can now follow me there, at rameshnyberg. I always find it fascinating how people communicate. There is this revolution going on with communication, an expansion so fast and so great that the spectrum of people who are alive today can sometimes be so far apart--there are people from my generation--let alone my parents---who still haven't bothered with email, and then there are my sons' peers, who are twittering, instant messaging, facebooking, and whatever else, as a matter of routine.

The immediacy of it is what is exciting to me: find a home for someone, take a picture from the driveway, and email it to a customer. Get a reply from them, and make an appointment to see the house, all from your mobile device, all in a matter of minutes. Makes me wonder what type of things my daughter will be communicating with ten or fifteen years from now.

Enough wondering--it's nearly 8am and I'm not out the door yet!