Brad O'Connor Directly addresses camera:  
Florida's housing market underperformed in September in terms of closed sales. But based on the latest statistics from Florida RealtorsŪ, there is some positive news on the inventory front. Let's start with those closed sales figures first, though, prior to September, the worst month this year for closed sales in terms of year over year declines was back in June.

Back then, single family home sales were down by over 11% compared to the same month in 2023. September's figures, however, turned out to be just slightly worse than that, with single family home sales falling a little over 12% year over year and over in the townhouse and condo market. We saw the same pattern, with year over year sales declining 20.5% in June, and slightly more by a couple tenths of a percentage point in September.

Now, it is tempting to put some of the blame for this on the arrival of Hurricane Helene during the last full week of September. If you look at the calendar and take into account weekends as well as the Labor Day holiday, there were only 20 business days during the month.

Helen arrived late in the month. Making landfall late on the night of the 26th as a powerful category four storm. That also happened to be a much wider storm than the typical hurricane. As a result, the right side of the storm, the side with onshore winds, brought about substantial storm surge. Well down the gulf coast of the peninsula.

So despite the center of the storm making landfall in the Big Bend area, the most sparsely populated part of the state, there was still a significant impact all the way down through the Tampa Bay region, at least near the water. So definitely some disruptions during those last three business days of the month.

One thing people often fail to take into account when analyzing the impact of events like these is that hurricanes can be disruptive to business even before they arrive and make landfall. Models were already predicting the formation and Florida impact of Hurricane Helene. Well in advance of its arrival, and the first advisories and forecast cones were issued by the National Hurricane Center on the morning of Monday, the 23rd.

Looking back at our calendar, that's an additional three days of disruptions caused by canceled or delayed appointments. As we prepared for the storm. So now we're down to just 14 business days that were unaffected by Helene during the month. That said, the National Hurricane Center was remarkably consistent in its forecasting of Helene and the cone largely focused in on the Big Bend area.

The entire time, keeping the worst of Helene off the highly populated west coast of the peninsula. That allowed the real estate market and much of the peninsula and the western panhandle to essentially operate in a close to normal fashion as the storm approached. And while the surge was significant in the Tampa Bay area and certainly caused damage near the coast, Helene Central hurricane force winds missed all of the state's major population centers, minimizing power outages and inland structural damage, as well.

Now, Hurricane Milton is a different story, of course. The heavily populated I-4 corridor and parts of southwest Florida were in its sights for several days, and it had a much bigger impact inland when it arrived, so we should expect its before and after effects to be more significant. But we will tackle that next month when we run through the October statistics.

Looking now at September's year over year changes and close home sales by county. You can see that most counties in Florida saw similar declines, regardless of their location, including areas that were never under any threat from Helene. That tells me that Helene did not have a very significant impact on clothes sales in September. A more plausible excuse for why home sales fell so much a year over year is that last September, sales were unexpectedly quite strong.

We can look back to 2018, 2019 and 2022 to see that it's common for sales to drop off a good amount from August to September. But that didn't happen last year. Still, there's no getting around the fact that housing demand in Florida and across much of the US has remained relatively weak for much of 2024, and that's the main reason we once again saw a drop in sales this past month.

Of course, good news came late last month in the form of the Federal Reserve finally announcing its first rate cut. The market actually started pricing in this shift in fed policy a few weeks in advance. So the average national 30 year fixed mortgage rate spent much of September at its lowest point since the beginning of 2023, just above the 6% mark.

That stimulated some demand, particularly in the single family segment of the housing market. New pending sales of single family homes were actually up year over year by about 2% on the townhouse and condo side of things. New pending sales did not have the same luck, but the more than 16% decline was still an improvement over last month's decline of 20.5%, and better than the nearly 21% drop in September closed sales that we had discussed earlier.

Among the more interesting tidbits to emerge from September's report is that new listings in both property type categories were down year over year for the first time in 2024. In the single family category, they were down by nearly 5% compared to a year ago. As they continue to track closely on a monthly basis with the levels of new listings we were seeing in 2018 and 2019 ahead of the pandemic in 2023, new listings of single family homes tracked well below these levels for most of the year until the late summer, which is the main reason why our year over year comparisons here in 2024 have gradually declined as the months have gone by.

Over in the townhouse and condo category, new listings were down a more modest 2%. But the same analysis applies here, too. It's reasonable to expect new listings to keep performing in this manner at the statewide level, at least until we move into next year's spring buying season. Active inventory levels continue to exceed last year's levels by a sizable margin, but the margin today is still significantly lower than earlier in the year.

At the end of September, there were just under 40% more unique active single family home listings compared to a year ago. We topped out at around 55% in May in the townhouse and condo market. We maxed out at 83% in May, but in September the gap was only a little over 65%. It's reasonable to expect that at these current trajectories, these margins will keep shrinking through the end of the year.

The slowdown in inventory growth is a sign that we will continue to see fairly stable prices in the next few months. Areas with a lot of inventory relative to pre-pandemic levels, particularly where there is significant competition from new construction, may see some price erosion over this period, but we expect home values largely to remain well above pre-pandemic levels.

The median sale price for close single family homes was up 2/10 of 1% in September, rising to $410,000, while over in the townhouse and condo category, the median price was down 3.4% to $314,000. It's important to remember, though, that the median price for single family homes is still almost 55% above where it was at this point in 2019.

While the median price for townhouses and condos is up almost 63%, which is part of the reason the latter property type category is trending worse in terms of sales and inventory levels. As I said earlier, we'll take a look at the impact of Hurricane Milton on the October numbers next month. But in the meantime, be sure to check out your local numbers for September and Sun Stats or your local RealtorŪ associations reports.

There continues to be a fair amount of variation across the state and multiple metrics. See you next month.