Brad O'Connor directly addresses camera:  Florida Realtors has just released its statewide housing market statistics for November 2024, and probably the most interesting things to show up in this month's report are the relatively strong reads in both new listings and new pending sales.
New listings of single-family homes in November were up over 7% compared to a year ago, their largest year-over-year increase in percentage terms since July. Meanwhile, new listings of condos and townhouses saw their largest year-over-year increase since July, as well, rising by roughly 5.5%.
New pending sales—which is the count of how many listings that went under contract during the month—were up big on the single-family home side in November, rising by more than 12.5% year over year. That's the first double-digit percentage increase we've seen in single-family new pending sales since April of 2021.
Over in the condo and townhouse category, where demand has been weaker relative to single-family homes over the last couple of years, new pending sales were down by almost 5% compared to a year ago. That said, this was the smallest year-over-year decline in new pending sales for condos and townhouses since April. From May through October, they had been down by double-digit percentages each month compared to the year prior.
These statistics give us some reason to be optimistic about the housing market in Florida. Mortgage rates hit their recent lows in late September, but predominantly increased throughout October and remained relatively high throughout November—and yet we saw a renewed level of listing and sales activity. Many markets elsewhere in the country have been showing signs of bottoming out on sales—is Florida next?
It's certainly possible, but there's one thing we shouldn't overlook here, which is that housing market activity in Florida was slowed down throughout much of the state in October due to Hurricane Milton and the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. In fact, the local markets that experienced the most disruption from the two hurricanes were largely also among those that saw the strongest year-over-year increases in new pending sales and new listings in November. This suggests that our increase in market activity in November was largely a result of unrealized activity from October getting pushed into November by the hurricanes. 
That said, the national decline in home sales has been showing a lot of signs of slowing down and turning around in many markets around the country, so we need to continue keeping an eye on Florida's statistics. The next few months of data will go a long way toward telling us where the Florida market really is.
While new listings and new pending sales stole the show this month, let's take a look at closed sales and median sale price before we go. Closed sales of single-family homes were down 3.5% year-over-year in November, and they fell by more than 15.5% in the condo and townhouse category. Given that new pending sales were relatively strong compared to these figures, we should expect a better showing from closed sales in December.
The median price for single-family home sales closing in November was $410,700, a decline of 0.6% compared to a year earlier but not all that different from what we've seen over the last several months. Over in the condo and townhouse category, the median price fell by almost 6% year over year to $311,000. This is not surprising given the relative weakness of the condo and townhouse market and the more substantial inventory growth it has seen over the course of the year.
As always, Florida Realtors has a wide array of other metrics available for you to review, not only at the statewide level, but also for your local market. Florida Realtors members can find the latest statistics on our interactive web application, SunStats. And of course, our statewide statistics are available to everyone at floridarealtors.org. Thanks for watching—we'll see you next month!