Friday, March 25, 2022

Brave New World

 

Anyone hoping for more residential inventory in Cocoa Beach or Cape Canaveral is advised not to hold their breath. Numbers have declined again after a brief spurt of increased supply last month. There are a total of 50 residential properties of all types listed for sale on our MLS this morning. There are another nine proposed properties looking for reservations. In the last thirty days 79 properties have closed. At that same rate, our 50 currently available properties will be gone in 19 days. I believe that may be the lowest our supply has ever been although I don't track that particular metric.

Of the 79 sold properties, over half sold for at least full asking price.

  • 27 sold for more than asking price.
  • 45 sold for cash.
  • 11 sold first day on market.
  • 48 sold in seven days or less.

With the high level of competition buyers have become creative and, in some cases, careless with offers. Some of the strategies I've seen are waiving inspections, waiving appraisal or agreeing to make up all or part of the difference in the event of a low appraisal, escalation clauses, fast closings, rent-backs to sellers and in one bizarre instance, discussion of a bribe.

Buyers looking for a single family home in Cocoa Beach have ten existing houses to choose from, none of them asking under a half million. There is only one single family listing in Cape Canaveral, a 69 year old 3/2 on almost two acres of beautiful Banana River frontage asking $1,650,000.

Advice for Prospective Buyers

I would advise all prospective buyers to deal with the reality that you will almost certainly be competing with other buyers and to have a strategy in mind before you make an offer. Do not expect to find a deal. They do not exist. Do not withdraw an offer because you suspect the listing agent is lying about multiple offers. Do not think you'll be able to whittle the price down after inspections. There are buyers standing by who will be more than willing to take your place without a credit for repairs. Speaking of taking your place; if you lose out in a multiple offer scenario, write a backup offer and get it signed by the seller if they're accepting backups. I'm seeing many failed contracts presumably because sellers are refusing concessions post inspection and others because of low appraisals. It's tough to be a buyer now but somehow, 79 determined buyers closed on what they were looking for in the last 30 days.

I noticed while researching these numbers that there are seven condo listings with missing condo names. An agent or consumer who searches for a unit by condo name in one of those seven buildings will not find those listing. Prospective buyers whose agent set up an auto-alert in the MLS for a unit in one of those buildings will not get a notice of those listings. In this market, they will sell anyway but may not bring what they might have if all interested buyers were included. I'd advise sellers to review their listings carefully as soon as they come active looking for errors or omissions. Our non-intuitive MLS listing entry process makes for easy omissions so even experienced agents can miss something but those that care will catch it in their last review before taking the listing live. There is zero excuse for a missing condo name on an active listing. 

The new luxury condo, The Surf, in downtown Cocoa Beach has topped out. There is one last unsold unit being offered for $1,999,000. The long-delayed development of million dollar single family homes on the riverfront site of the old Joyce's Trailer Park in south Cocoa Beach is finally in high gear. I will be interested to see if the developer makes good on his promise of restoring and opening the clubhouse over the river in the old Fisherman's Wharf restaurant building. It was promised to buyers of units in the developer's other condos in south Cocoa Beach in addition to the buyers of the new houses. Some of those condo buyers have been waiting for their clubhouse for over five years.

"The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press...did not foresee...the development of a mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal...In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." __Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)