Orlando Real Estate

These numbers are preliminary, but I would not expect them to change too much in the next few days. First, sales were still very strong last month with around 3,600 new contracts written on pending and closed sales. There have been 2,474 sales posted so far, but that will likely go up by a another 200 or so. The median price of those sales was $115,000 which is a slight increase from the last few months of $110,000. Of the closed sales 1,225 were cash deals continuing the trend of about half of all sales coming in as cash transactions. I will have to run the numbers to see just how much cash has flowed into Orlando real estate so far this year. I am going to guess it may be as much as half a billion dollars. Just over 64% of the closed sales were distressed properties which again is a bit lower than the 67% we were seeing a few months ago.

Active listings continue to hang around the 16,000 mark with 15,,986 available for sale. Bank owned and short sale properties continue to make up almost half the homes for sale with 48.4% of the total. Only about 12.8% are REO's with 2,048 and more than a third are short sales with 5,691. Pending contracts are down a little from their high of over 11,000 with 10,467. This is the segment reflecting the biggest impact of distressed properties with 2,051 REO's and 6,630 short sales for a total of 82.9% of all contracts pending. At the current sales pace there is about a 6.5 month inventory of homes available for sale. There is another 4.2 month supply of pending sales, because of the continued backlog of short sales.  Only 8.7% or 579 of the pending short sales closed in May. The banks seem to be making faster decisions, but the percentage of closed short sales is not improving. I am looking forward to a strong Summer selling season.

David Welch Real Estate Optimist, Orlando Real Estate