Brad O'Connor directly addresses camera:  Florida's housing market faced a lot of challenges in October. As the month began, parts of the state were still reeling from the impacts of category four Hurricane Helene. Helene came ashore at the end of September in the sparsely populated Big Bend area of the Panhandle. But along the way, it produced a significant storm surge damage well down the Gulf Coast of the peninsula and into Tampa Bay.

Floridians barely had time to catch their breath before the National Hurricane Center on October 5th issued the first advisory for another tropical system that they were forecasting to threaten the Sunshine State. The early forecasts indicated the most likely point of landfall would be just south of Tampa Bay, in the Sarasota and Bradenton area. They also indicated that the storm would likely strengthen into a monster hurricane along the way, but weakened just ahead of landfall.

These forecasts proved to be correct. Hurricane Milton, formed as expected, became a major category five hurricane and weakened into a category three storm before it came ashore near Siesta Key on October 9th.

Milton caused significant coastal damage from Tampa Bay down well to the south along the Gulf Coast, and led to a lot of setbacks in the Tampa Bay area’s ongoing recovery from Halloween. While inland areas were spared from catastrophic winds due to Milton's weakening ahead of landfall, there were still widespread power outages throughout the western I-4 corridor, including in the Orlando area.

As if all of this wasn't enough. Mortgage interest rates, which had reached their lows for the year in September, began climbing again. In the first week of October, Freddie Mac reported the national average interest rate on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage climbed 2/10 of one percentage point from where they were the week prior. Up to 6.3% by the end of the month.

Freddie was reporting that the average national rate was near 6.8%, its highest level since July.  All of these significant challenges, however, failed to substantially deepen the Florida housing markets current sales slump. Based on the newly released October statistics from Florida Realtors®. At the statewide level, closed sales of single family homes were down a little over 5.5% year over year, which is actually an improvement over September's decline of over 12%.

Townhouse in condo sales were down more significantly by nearly 20%, but that was in line with the trend of the prior two months as well. The storms, along with a renewed strengthening of the mortgage rate lock in effect, likely had a bigger impact on new listings of homes for sale in October. New listings of single family homes fell by over 10% year over year, but are still up 9.5% for the year to date.

New listings of townhouses and condos, meanwhile, were down about 9.5% compared to a year ago, but are still up 12% for the year. Granted, the rate of new listings coming onto the market was already slowing ahead of the storms, but the year over year declines in October were a sizable jump and very likely related to the unique pattern of events that unfolded throughout the month.

Home prices were largely unaffected by the hurricanes, which is actually typical. Major hurricane landfalls in Florida tend to affect listing and sales activity in the short run, particularly in the areas most impacted, but they rarely impact home prices. The statewide median sale price for single family homes in October was $420,000, a 1.2% rise compared to a year ago.

While the median sale price for townhouses and condos was down slightly for the fourth consecutive month, falling by 2.2% to $315,000. We've covered the state as a whole in this video, but what about your particular market area? Do you operate in one of the Gulf Coast markets that felt the brunt of one or both of these hurricanes?

If you're a member of Florida Realtors®, you can always find your local area statistics at Florida Realtors dot org slash research. Or through our interactive web application Sun Stats, which you can find at Sun Stats dot Florida realtors.org. Take a look and see if there was a significant difference in your statistics for October compared to the prior month.

You'll probably find the prices were stable, but in many of the affected areas, declines and new listings and new sales contracts were likely a little stronger than what we saw at the statewide level. We'll see you all next month.