Market Update for September 2025
With Brad O’Connor Ph.D.
TRT: 8m 43s
Video Transcription

Brad O’Connor directly addresses camera:  Florida Realtors® has just released its September housing market statistics, and there’s some really interesting data points for us to go over this month. Now, you might recall that the big news from last month’s August report was that new pending sales of single-family homes were up by about 10% compared to a year ago, and they were up by almost 5% in the condo and townhouse category, as well. These were the strongest year-over-year growth rates we’ve seen for new pending sales in some time, and we speculated that they might translate into growth in closed sales as soon as September. 
So, did this come to pass? Indeed it did! Closed sales of Florida single-family homes were up year-over-year in September for only the third time in 2025. But in contrast to the previous two cases, namely January and June, September’s single-family closed sales were up to a much greater degree, rising by over 13 1/2% compared to a year ago.
As if that wasn’t impressive enough, closed sales in the condo and townhouse category were up year-over-year in September for the *first* time in *17 months*, rising by 8% compared to a year ago.
As we first discussed in last month's video, the bounce in new pending sales in August and now the resulting rise in closed sales in September were likely driven in large part by recent lows in mortgage rates. Throughout August, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate hovered just above 6 1/2%, lower than what we’d seen earlier in the year. This downward trend, combined with expectations among buyers of more rate cuts in the future, had a positive effect on demand for Florida homes. But look at what's happened since then: rates have fallen even further, which has made it possible for even more buyers to be able to participate in the housing market. So the natural question is, did we also see a rise in new pending sales for the second straight month in September?
Well, it would appear so. New pending sales of Florida single-family homes were up by 7% compared to a year ago in September. And likewise, over in the condo and townhouse category, new pending sales were up by over 6 1/2%. So now we have two consecutive months where new pending sales have been up year over year in both property type categories. It’s still a little early to definitively declare a shift in the overall trend to one of longer-term positive sales growth, but at the very least we can be more confident we’re moving in that direction than we were a month ago. 
Unfortunately, this analysis will have an added complication over the next two months, because in October of last year, the Florida housing market was impacted both by the aftereffects of Hurricane Helene, which arrived at the end of September, as well as pre- and post-storm impacts from Hurricane Milton. If new pending sales are up year over year again in October 2025, at least part of the reason will be because we’ll be comparing to the month last year where the market was most impacted by these two hurricanes.  Of course, in many cases, new listings and new pending sales that would otherwise have occurred last October were simply bumped into November, which resulted in higher-than-usual activity for that month. So we’ll have to factor that in as well when the November statistics are published.
Let’s now take a look at what’s going on with the seller side of the Florida housing market. As we’ve discussed often in recent months, new listings of single-family homes were elevated through the first four months of 2025, but have been down year over year for four consecutive months since then. Well, in September, that streak was broken. We were back up compared to a year ago—but get this: we were only up by 10 sales *statewide*.  That’s right, just 10 across the entire state. Last September, a total of 26,829 homes came onto the market in Florida, whereas this September, the total was *26,839*. We probably would have been down again if not for Hurricane Helene pushing some listings back a month or two at the end of last September. So while we technically bucked the recent trend, in reality, this is likely not a shift of any significance. Still, we’ll keep our eyes on it. There’s a good chance we’ll technically be up year-over-year for October, too, due to the same base effects from Helene and Milton we just discussed in our analysis of new pending sales. 
Over in the condo and townhouse category, we had a five-month streak of new listings being down year over year coming into September, and in this case, the streak was preserved, with new listings falling by close to 7% compared to a year ago. This was the smallest decline we’ve seen since April, but still a respectable one by recent standards.
With new listings failing to increase in any substantial way in September, combined with the rise in new pending sales, end-of-month inventory levels were down again compared to the prior month in both property type categories. That makes for four consecutive month-over-month declines now in single-family inventory, and five consecutive month-over-month declines in condo and townhouse inventory. The rate of these declines did slow a bit for both property type categories in September, which is normal for this time of year if we look back to prior years when inventory levels were more stable, like they were from 2014 through 2019. So we continue to see signs of stabilization in our inventory levels, at least at the state level.
Normalizing inventory levels usually foreshadow some moderation in home price trends, too. We saw some of that in September, with single-family median sale prices coming in unchanged from one year ago, at $410,000. That marks the first time the statewide single-family median price has failed to decline on a year-over-year basis since February.
Over in the condo and townhouse category, where price declines have been larger and more persistent over the past two years, the median sale price in September was down by close to 5% compared to last year, falling to $299,000. Still, that’s the smallest year-over-year decline in percentage terms we’ve seen since March.
It’s taken a while, but the Florida housing market is finally showing some signs of reaching a bottom in terms of sales. Inventory levels continue to show some signs of stabilization, and prices as of late seem to be trending in that direction. 
Mortgage rates continue to be the key determinant of where the market will go from here. While we’re still close to our lows for the year, the sledding gets tougher from here as it will require increasingly stronger combinations of downward shifts in inflation rates, increases in the national unemployment rate, and movement in several other factors to push mortgage rates significantly lower from where we’re at now. On the positive side, however, there is not much on the horizon at this time that suggests we’re going to see rates pop back up to where they were early this year, either. 
If we look back a few years, we can see that while we’re at a good place relative to where we were at the beginning of this year, mortgage rates are still elevated compared to where we were ahead of the pandemic. But that said, there’s only been a couple of times since the end of 2022 that rates have been lower than where they’re at now, and those occasions were short-lived. If we manage to consistently stay where we’re at now for a longer time period—or even better, if we see further downward movement in rates—this market *will* turn around.
That’s it for this month’s video. While we focused on our September statistics in this video, don’t forget that September marks the end of the third quarter of 2025, so if you’re looking for quarterly data, we’ve got you covered on that, as well. Visit www.floridarealtors.org/research to access our monthly and quarterly statewide reports. And be sure, as always, to use SunStats from Florida Realtors® or your local MLS or Realtor® association’s resources to check out your local area statistics. It’s always a good practice to see the extent to which your market mirrors what we’re seeing at the state level. I’ll see you next month for our October stats release!