Orlando Real Estate Statistics April 2009 (so far)

I spoke at the Orlando Regional Realtor Association 2nd Annual Tech Fair on Friday to three different groups about Active Rain. Thank you to those of you that sent me suggestions on what to speak about. For those of you that attended, I certainly hope that you found the information useful. I also hope you enjoyed the presentation.

Official numbers of course will not be out until next week, and I will report these again in a couple of days because the board pulls the data on the 5th. I just wanted to take a quick look, because we wrote a lot of contracts last month (over 3,000) and I phone and e-mail have been going gangbusters the last couple of weeks. Sales have been rockin for with seven months of year over year improvements and April was no exception. So far 1,704 closed sales have been posted with a median price of $132,900. That price is down from $137,000 in March, but the percentage of sold homes that are distressed properties remained pretty consistent at 56.7% There was an article in yesterday's paper that I shared on my facebook and @realtyoptimist. Banks are backing off the foreclosures and working with more homeowners to keep them in their homes.

More good news that shows how strong sales are and how slow the banks are is the pending sales contracts. There are currently 5,838 pending sales with 3,884 or 66.5% of them being distressed again this number is pretty consistent with what we have seen for the past several months. One quick note on this, because I have heard this brought up a few times. There are buyers putting in multiple offers on short sales who have no intention of closing on all the properties they offer on. I have absolutely no feel for how much of this is going on, but anyone doing this should be very careful that they are protecting themselves. I estimate that only about 1/3 of the short sales are getting closed, but that is more of an educated guess than anything else. Continuing with the good news about the Orlando real estate market, inventory is down about 6% from March's 21,448 to 20,170 as of this morning. That represents an 11.86 month supply of homes available for sale at April's sales pace. If inventory continues to drop at this pace, the Orlando real estate market could reach equilibrium (6 months supply of homes) by the end of the year.

David Welch, Real Estate Optimist, @RealtyOptimist