Orlando Real Estate

These are my final numbers for the month of April, and I think we may be starting to see just a wee bit of a change. The active inventory is actually down a few hundred homes, probably a result of the last minute push to take advantage of the expiring tax credit. Today Orlando Realtors have 15,689 homes listed including 1,741 bank owned and 5,601 short sales, representing 11.1% and 35.7% of the inventory respectively. Both the number and percentage of distressed properties are on the lower side of what we have been seeing for several months. Pending sales remain very high with 11,042 homes currently under contract. Of those 2,120 are REO and a whopping 6,772 are short sales combining for 80.5% of all contracts. While the number of pendings continues to rise the percentage of distressed properties is down slightly.

Sales remained very brisk last month with 2,569 closed transactions. That is a tad fewer than March, but still very strong. Of those sales 1,156 or 45% were bank owned homes, and another 576 or 22.4% were short sales. This is pretty consistent with what we have had for several months now with just over 2/3 of the closed sales being distressed. The 576 closed short sales represents just 8.5% of the pending short sales which is also very much in line with what I have noted for over a year now. Cash deals are also still dominating our market. I decided to break the cash deals down more into REO, short sale and normal sales. While overall 48.1% of the closed sales last month were cash, only 29% of the "normal" sales were cash deals. Short sales saw 43.6% of closings as cash sales, and 64.2% of REO's were cash sales. Investors apparently are still in a feeding frenzy, picking up great deals especially in the condo market. There were 555 condos sold last month and 503 or 90.6% were cash sales.

David Welch Real Estate Optimist, Orlando Real Estate