Houses vs Condos

The moonrises over the ocean this week have been spectacular.

I mentioned in the last post that different market segments can behave very differently at the same time and used the Cocoa Beach single-family market and condo market as examples. Let’s dive into the details and see just how differently they are performing.

We typically have about five to six times the number of condos for sale at any one moment as houses. This morning there are 64 MLS-listed homes for sale in Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral and 299 condo units. During the month of October, 15 homes and 34 condo units closed. That means that we have about a 17 week supply of homes versus around 35 weeks for condos.

Median time on market for the sold homes in October was 55 days. For condos it was 151 days. As I mentioned in the Market Snapshot post, time on market is heavily manipulated so the real time to sell is longer than the MLS shows. More than a quarter of the sold properties, both homes and condos, took longer to sell than shown in the MLS but the fact that most condos are taking about three times as long to sell as homes is accurate.

Median selling price for homes was $1,012,000 and $335,000 for condos. Cash buyers dominated the market with two thirds of condo buyers and 60% of single-family home purchasers paying cash. That trend is likely to continue. There do not seem to be any reasons to expect market conditions to change until after New Years when we typically see an uptick in new listings and sales activity in both market segments. Until then we can expect more of the same absent some external macro event. Good luck to all participants. Knowing what’s going on in your market segment will go a long way towards success whether buying or selling.

Reminder to sellers to check your MLS listings for accuracy and completeness. The 15 condo listings on our MLS today that have incorrect or missing condo names may not be included in auto-search emails for buyers who are looking for a unit in a specific condo. If there are prospective buyers with an auto-search set up for Sandcastles, they are not going to get an email about a new listing there if the listing agent’s assistant spelled the name as Sand Castles.

Anyone willing to venture a guess on when/if the development of new houses on the site of Joyce’s Trailer Park in south Cocoa Beach will have its first completed structure? The MLS tells me that ten of them closed, all for cash, at prices between $970,000 and $1,495,000, between 2019 and 2022. Some of these closings happened before the slabs had even been poured and now they have been sitting at various stages of completion for years with sporadic activity and not a single one yet completed. I would love to hear from anyone with any insight into what happened or is happening there.

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” _Kurt Vonnegut