Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Eyes right



A golfer pauses in his game yesterday at the Cocoa Beach Country Club to snap a photo of the space shuttle Atlantis taking off for it's mission to repair the Hubble space telescope. Astronaut Mike Massimo has promised to do occasional Twitter updates from the shuttle. You can follow him here.

Twelve days into May and sales are chugging along with 9 condos closed so far in Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral. Only one closed single-family home in the same period, a trashed 4/2 canal-front on Riverview in Cocoa Beach that sold for $225,000. The condos sold so far this month ranged from a tiny Golden Gate Manor for $25,000 to a 3rd floor, remodeled, south view 2/2 at Windward East that brought $285,000. A foreclosed Perlas del Mar that sold new in April 2007 for $435,000 went for $162,000 last week.

Short sale contracts continue to clog the system helping to push the number of contingent or pending contracts showing on the MLS to 105 this morning. Recent experience leads me to believe that only a fraction of these will close. Problems abound for purchasers ranging from tighter requirements for condo loans to unresponsive short sale lien holders. When it all comes together, patient buyers have scored some outstanding deals so far this year. I expect that to continue although supply for certain property types has become slim. Direct ocean, 2nd floor or higher units that are priced right are downright rare. Unrealistic sellers of those same units do, however, exist in great numbers.

If you'd like to get daily updates of all interesting activity (MLS and other) in Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral you can receive them by following my Twitter feed here.

Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.”
Winston Churchill: “If I were your husband, I would take it.”