Market Update 
With Brad O’Connor Ph.D.
TRT: 12m 57s
Video Transcription

Brad O’Connor Directly addresses camera:  The first half of 2025 has come to a close, and Florida Realtors® has just released its housing market statistics for the month of June. So let's take a look at what's going on here in the Sunshine State. Given that we're at the midpoint of the year, this is a nice month for us to get a little more comprehensive in our analysis than we usually do.

As we typically do, though, let's start by looking at the latest figures for closed home sales in Florida. Last year, there was a sizable drop in the number of sales from May to June. It's normal for closed sales to tail off a little at this time of year, as the spring buying season comes to a close. But this drop was larger than usual. Here in 2025, however, the May to June decline was far more mild, and as a result, closed sales of single family homes were up on a year over year basis in June for the first time since January, rising by nearly 3%. This rebound in June helped to temper what would have been otherwise a very sluggish second quarter for closings. Overall, single family home sales were only down a little over 2.5% compared to a year ago in Q2, and are down somewhat closer to 2% for the year as a whole.

Over in our condo and townhouse property type category, closed sales also experienced an unusually large month over month decline from May to June last year. Just as single family home sales did. And likewise, this year's decline was far less significant. The difference for condos and townhouses, though, is that it still wasn't enough to result in a year over year increase in sales for June.

Granted, in May, condo and townhouse sales were down by virtually 20% relative to a year ago. So June's year over year decline of only about 6.5% was far less severe by comparison. Still, the second quarter was a rough one overall for condo and townhouse sales, which fell by over 14% compared to Q2 of last year. Condo units, in particular, continued to experience stunted demand in the face of new reserve requirements and difficulties with insurance. Statewide we've still seen close to 46,000 condo and townhouse sales this year, but that is down by 12% compared to the first half of last year. Drilling down to a more local level, condo and townhouse sales were only down year over year in half of Florida's 22 metro areas in June, but for the year overall, so far, they remain down compared to 2024.

In every metro, with any significant stock of condo units. Over on the single family side. Sales were up in 14 of the 22 metros in June, particularly along the Gulf Coast. Year to date, however, the picture is murkier, with only six metros currently up in the sales column compared to last year at this time. Although, to be fair, an additional five metros are notably only down by less than 2% and could conceivably turn the ship around in short order during the summer months.

Let's now move our focus over to a supply side metric new listings. New listings track how many individual homes were listed for sale in one or more of Florida's Multiple Listing Services each month. For this statistic, we exclude new listings of properties that have only been on the market for less than two months, unless the reason they went off the market was a successful sale.

We do this so that we predominantly only capture fresh new sale attempts, rather than homes that were essentially already on the market. In the single family category, new listings were elevated for the first four months of the year, particularly in January and March, but they were down by almost 2.5% in May, and by slightly more than that in our newly published statistics for June.

Consequently, even though year to date we are still up by nearly 4.5% compared to a year ago. It's almost entirely due to those first quarter increases for the second quarter overall. New listings of single family homes were down by less than 1% year over year. The last quarter that new listings were down year over year was back in Q3 of 2023.

If you're a regular viewer of our videos, you are probably getting tired of hearing me say this, as I've been repeating ad nauseum over the past five years. But it's really, really important not to interpret active inventory. That is the number of homes currently listed for sale as a gauge of how many homes are coming onto the market.

Not only are there a lot of amateur analysts on social media out there who are guilty of this mistake, there are frequently professional analysts who make it as well. To illustrate, let me draw your attention back to our new listings data here for the first half of 2025. It shows that so far this year, we've seen about 204,000 new listings of single family homes in Florida.

That's the same number we had at this point of the year back in 2022. With that in mind, let's take a look at our inventory of single family homes back at the end of June 2022. At that time, we were up from our lows, but we still only had about 53,000 homes on the market. Contrast that with where inventory is at now.  We have over 115,000 homes on the market, more than twice as much as we did three years ago.

Of course, it's easy to imagine looking only at this chart, that a surge in new listings coming to market must be driving the rise in inventory. But the thing is, a slowdown in the number of sales or an increase in how long homes stay on the market can increase inventory levels, even if the rate of new listings isn't increasing.

Sure. A new listing adds to inventory, but a sale subtracts from it. Other things equal. Fewer sales means less subtraction. So a larger inventory on net, many of the 204,000 homes that came onto the market in the first half of 2022 never even got counted in our monthly inventory statistics because they were under contract before the end of the month.

They were listed. This year, not only have we had fewer single family home sales than in 2022, about 128,000, compared to 162,000. But the vast majority of homes are still on the market at the end of the month they were listed, and frequently at the end of the next month or two as well. The typical Florida single family home sale that closed in June was for a property that was on the market for 46 days before going under contract.

Back in June 2022, that figure was only ten days. So today, when we look online to see all the properties currently listed for sale in our market areas, we get a lot more search results than we would have found at this time in 2022, even though about the same number of homes were listed for sale in the first half of the year in both 2022 and 2025.

Now going back to our single family new listings charts. It is true, as we discussed earlier that year to date, new listings are up about 4.5% in 2025 compared to a year ago. That has contributed to the continued rise in inventory levels over the past few months. But keep in mind that the 2.3% slowdown in sales and increase in days on market bear a lot of responsibility for these climbing inventory levels as well.

So remember, if you're seeing an increase in inventory levels in your area, you usually can't tell from that alone. If you're experiencing a surge in new listing activity. You have to check the new listings statistic to know for sure. Now that I've successfully concluded yet another rant about new listings versus inventory, let's get back on track and take a look at new listings of condos and townhouses, In June,

new listings in this property type category were down compared to a year ago. For the third consecutive month and the fourth month this year. Overall, falling by 7.5%. That puts us down by over 6% for the second quarter overall, and it's essentially canceled out the strong increases we observed in January and March. So year to date, new listings in this category are now down compared to a year ago, but only by less than 1%. In May and June in particular, new listings of condos and townhouses have been more in line with their 2019 levels than in any other recent years.

So if you're still reading or hearing that everyone in your area is trying to sell their condo, be sure to verify with your local new listings data, and you'll probably find that's pretty far from the truth at the metro area level. New listings of condos and townhouses are down in nine of the state's 22 metros year to date, but they were down year over year in 16 metros in June specifically, which may be more reflective of what's to come over the next few months.

We are seeing something similar on the single family home side, with new listings down year over year in 15 metros in June, but due to stronger levels of listings early in the year for this property type category, single family new listings are only down in five metros for the year so far. Returning now to inventory levels, active listings of single family homes for sale were down on a month over month basis for the first time this year.

At the end of June, reflecting the recent slowdown in new listings growth and relative uptick in sales growth. It's way too early to say if this retraction and inventory has any legs, but it's notably the first real slowdown in inventory growth that we've seen for single family homes going into summer since 2020. Over in the condo and townhouse category, inventory fell for the second month in a row on a month over month basis, and the decline has been somewhat more stark than what we've seen on the single family side. But keep in mind that inventory growth has been slower for condos and townhouses than for single family homes at this time of year. Over the past four years.

So this is in part, a function of seasonal and geographic differences between the two property type categories. In any case, the inventory levels for both categories remain in excess of the pre-pandemic norms we observed during the relatively stable period of 2014 through 2019. In terms of months of supply, condo and townhouse inventory continues to far exceed that of single family homes due to the weaker rate of sales in this category.

Florida's condos and townhouses are squarely within buyer's market territory and have been for some time, with median sale prices breaking into negative territory on a year over year basis last year and continuing into this year. In fact, in June, we experienced our 12th consecutive month of year over year declines and the median sale price for condos and townhouses, it fell by 7.7% compared to a year ago, down to $300,000.

At this level, the median price is about 43% above where it was at this time back in 2020, which works out to an annual average of 7.4% growth over this five year period. There remains some bifurcation in the condo market, however, as the new reserve requirements and ongoing insurance issues do not affect every condo property equally. Newer properties and those where documentation is readily available and provided by the condo association for buyers and lenders to inspect, are going to continue to hold their value better and sell faster than otherwise similar properties

On the single family side, the statewide median price for closed sales fell for the fourth consecutive month in June, falling by 3.5% to $412,000. That puts us about 46% above the median price from back in June of 2020, which works out to an average annual rate of close to 8% per year over the five year period.

At the local level, though, there's some variation in the trend here and some markets are holding their value better than others. Markets that have seen more intense inventory growth and a lot of recent new single family construction are generally seeing price declines, whereas other areas are still seeing price increases. Buyers now have the upper hand in most local Florida markets, but certainly not all of them.

What about in your market? Well, if you're a member of Florida Realtors®, you can explore your local data to find out by going to SunStats.floridarealtors.org. There you'll find the latest, most accurate statistics available for every metro area, county, city, and zip code in the state right at your fingertips. So be sure to dig into your local statistics for June and continue to master your market.

I'll be back next month with another update. See you then.