Market Update may 2025
With Brad O’Connor Ph.D.
TRT 5m 2s
Video Transcription

In March, we saw 30-year fixed mortgage rates fall a bit for the first time in a few months, but they popped right back up close to 7% in April. That certainly did not help us see an improvement in closed sales a month down the road in May, based on the latest market statistics from Florida Realtors. 
Closed sales of Florida single-family homes were down almost 6% in May compared to a year ago, while over on the condo and townhouse category, sales were down nearly 20%. 
Florida’s median price for closed sales of single-family homes was down year over year for the third consecutive month in May, falling by close to 3% to $415,000. That’s less than April’s decline of 4%, but there is a clear divergence from last year’s price levels starting to emerge. Still, prices remain in the neighborhood of where they’ve been since early 2022 and are 54% above where they were at this time in 2020. May’s year-over-year decline at the state level also masks some considerable variation at the local level, with the median price for single-family homes only falling in 13 of Florida’s 22 metropolitan areas.
Over in the condo and townhouse category, we started to see price erosion all the way back in July of last year. That trend continued in the latest figures, with the statewide median sale price in this category falling a little over 6% to $310,000. That’s still 54% higher than in 2020—the same difference observed for the single-family side of the market—but in this case, there is more uniformity at the local level, with 19 of Florida’s 22 metros seeing a year-over-year price decline in May.
The fact that we’re seeing some price weakness in both the single-family category and the condo and townhouse category shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of our regular viewers. We’ve been chronicling the expansion of Florida’s inventory of homes for sale since early 2022. For more than a year, within both property type categories, inventory levels have been in excess of the levels that were typical of the period of housing market stability we experienced from 2014 through 2019. They remain well below the levels we were seeing in 2008 when we experienced a large price correction during the Great Financial Crisis, which is why right now we are only seeing some minor price erosion by comparison. 
Still, inventory levels have continued to rise very consistently ever since mortgage rates began escalating rapidly back in 2022, and that’s what makes the inventory statistics reported for May so interesting. Statewide, there were only 156 more single-family homes for sale at the end of May than there were at the end of April. That’s a month-over-month increase of only about 0.1%. That’s significantly slower growth in single-family inventory than we’ve been seeing in recent months. And over in the condo and townhouse category, inventory actually fell by a little over 2.5% compared to a month ago.
New pending sales declined year-over-year in May, falling by 0.7% for single-family homes and by almost 10% for condos and townhouses. These declines should actually have been contributors to inventory growth, not impediments. So, something else must have offset them. What was the culprit?
The answer is a decline in new listings. Almost 2.5% fewer single-family homes came onto the market in May compared to a year ago. That might not sound like a lot, but excluding September and October of last year when we were dealing with the impacts of hurricanes Helene and Milton, this is the first time that new listings of single-family homes have declined on a year-over-year basis since August of 2023. It’s clear from the chart here that new listings were elevated in the first four months of 2025, but they fell back into their typical range in May. And over in the condo and townhouse category, the decline in new listings was even more significant, at close to 10%. 
Keep in mind that this is a part of the year where, under normal market conditions, inventory tends to fall on a month-over-month basis, so some of this is due to seasonal factors. But considering that inventory has recently been bucking typical seasonal trends, this is a significant development and we’ll want to watch this statistic closely over the next few months to see if it continues.
There’s still a fair amount of variation at the local level in price and inventory trends. Florida Realtors members can find the latest local market statistics on our interactive web application, SunStats. And of course our statewide statistics are available to everyone at floridarealtors.org. Thanks for watching—we’ll see you next month!