South Walton Real Estate Sales for November 2010

Typically, home sales in South Walton, Florida tend to fall off after the end of the busy summer. Last year surprised us with higher than usual sales in the fall, and this year is also shaping up nicely.

The summer of 2010 saw terrible sales numbers due to the Deepwater Horizon incident, so it is no surprise that November home sales were better than our typically busiest months of July and August. 

Part of what is causing the higher quantity of home sales in South Walton is that the median selling price continues to trend downward slightly.

 How do home sales in November 2010 compare to previous years of November sales?

According to  sales reported to ECAR (Emerald Coast Association of Realtors), we had more home sales in South Walton in November 2010 than we had in the last eleven years, excluding November 2004.

Again, there is good reason for those high sales results — lower median sales prices are driving the  market. There is still a great amount of inventory on the market, but buyers are teaming up with Realtors to find the best values and not wasting their time looking at the over-priced listings which have been on the market for a long time.

Many of those “sellers” with over-priced listings will not be sellers until a) they reduce their price to a level where buyers see value, or b) a buyer really likes the house because of very unique features and has cash to pay for it.

Many sellers refuse to look at useful tools like this “Average List Price” chart which shows the average list price of new listings of homes, compared to active (existing), contingent, pending, sold, withdrawn and expired listings.  We can see that the average list price of properties which sold in November were almost half the price of those listings which for whatever reason were withdrawn from the market. (Don’t mistake this chart to mean that properties are selling for half of the listing price. That isn’t the case.) The expired listings were also, on average, about double the listing price of those which sold. Near the top is the existing (active) inventory, which has been thoroughly picked over. If we believe these statistics, much of the active inventory will not sell until sellers find the price where buyers are willing to see value. One other thing this chart shows is that on average, many new listings that hit the market in November are priced well above those listings which went pending and contingent.

What is coming down the pipeline for sales in South Walton?

We will look at a bigger picture to answer this question and look not only at homes, but also look at condos and town homes. Pending sales for 2010 are shown in gold color on the chart and you can see that in November, we had 141 pending sales, which is up 38% compared to Nov 2009.  Keep in mind that last year was fairly strong compared to the previous few years, and the pending sales for 2010 are up significantly compared to the same Fall months of 2009. If we see most of these pending sales going to close, South Walton should continue to see good sales numbers coming in the near future.