Hot housing market sparks bidding wars

Buying a house these days can mean putting up a fight. A surprisingly strong housing market this spring has put more homebuyers in the middle of bidding wars in South Florida, buyers and agents say. The race for a place is especially heated for families seeking homes from $200,000 to $400,000, which are harder to come by.
"The words 'Make your highest and best offer' are like nails on a chalkboard," said Judy Trudel, a buyer's agent in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Sean Zamora is typical of many exasperated buyers. The 32-year-old charter manager for a yacht broker was outbid on four houses in Fort Lauderdale, even though he offered near list price. He suspects that asking the sellers to pay closing costs was the deal-breaker each time.

"It was just a big pain," said Zamora, who eventually bought a two-bedroom home on the east side of town. "You just have to deal with it. What can you do?"

Andy Constant figured he had some wiggle room on a three-bedroom Parkland home listed for $419,900. He bid $380,000, only to be told of another offer at $405,000.

Convinced that bidding eventually would stretch beyond the asking price, Constant and his wife, Rachel, wanted to stand out from the other buyers. So they offered $427,500 and wrote a personal letter to the seller, saying they pictured their son playing catch in the front yard and their daughter riding her scooter in the driveway.

"That was kind of the clincher," Andy Constant, 45, said of the letter. "It gave a personal flavor to the transaction."

The bidding wars are reminiscent of 2012 and 2013, when investors started buying properties in bunches after prices hit bottom. Buyers needing mortgages lost out to cash offers, while some buyers risked losing deals if they took longer than a day to make a decision.

Heavy demand helped give the once-reeling market a boost and led to double-digit price increases in Broward and Palm Beach counties. That pace, though, couldn't continue, and the market cooled in 2014.

Now buyer urgency is back, fueled by loosening restrictions on mortgages and young families eager to find something before the next school year starts, agents say. An improving job market and low mortgage rates also are contributing to the sales binge.

Palm Beach County sales rose 18 percent in April from a year ago, and the 1,743 transactions were the most in a single month since 2004, according to the Realtors Association of the Palm Beaches. Broward had 1,465 sales, up 10 percent from a year earlier, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Realtors said.
Real estate observers had hoped that higher prices would persuade more sellers to test the market, though buyers are still complaining about a lack of quality listings.

Agents say a market balanced equally between buyers and sellers has a six-month supply of homes, meaning it would take that long to sell all of the existing properties if no more were listed. At the end of April, Broward had a 4.8-month supply, while Palm Beach County was at five months, according to the local Realtor boards.

While the two counties are starting to see more lower-priced homes for sale, most aren't in move-in condition, agents say.

"It seems like all the good stuff on the market is gone, and now we're dealing with the listings that don't meet buyers' criteria," said Beverly Rothstein, an agent for Berkshire Hathaway Home Sales. "It could need a new roof or an updated kitchen, or it could be any one of 50 things."

Donna and Jim Stetson started looking for homes in northwest Broward shortly after the first of the year, taking a conservative, if not leisurely, approach.

After losing four houses to more aggressive buyers, the Stetsons zeroed in on a four-bedroom home with a pool and a lake view in the Westchester neighborhood of Coral Springs. The couple was determined not to lose another home and beat out at least one other buyer in offering $5,000 above the $349,900 list price.

"I hate bidding wars," said Donna Stetson, 58, a customer service representative for a software provider. "It's anxious and uncertain and just feels wrong. You give them a full-price offer and you still have to 'win' the house.

"It's not like the old days when you make an offer and get a counter. You know what you're dealing with. In a bidding war, you don't know what you're dealing with."

Keyes Co. agent Beth Patterson said one of her clients is struggling to find a home in her preferred neighborhood, Lauderdale Isles in southwest Broward.

Patterson said the client receives text alerts whenever one of the homes comes on the market. They rush over to look at it as soon as the property is available. In each case, the client lost out to a higher offer or the home already was under contract.

In this environment, agents say, buyers shouldn't get cute. If the home is in good condition and priced close to market value, it probably will attract multiple offers. A strong initial bid and few contingencies are the best bets for striking a deal.

Agents and analysts expect the sales pace to slow this summer, easing the burden on buyers. Until then, they'll have to strike a balance between staying vigilant and making a poor financial decision, Patterson said.

"Right now their mindset makes them a little desperate," she said, "and more willing to pay more than they probably should."

Repost courtesy and Copyright © 2015 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.), Paul Owers. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.  Original post here: http://www.floridarealtors.org/NewsAndEvents/article.cfm?p=4&id=323905

Palm Beach County sales up 37% from a year ago

Home Prices Fall, Triggering Sales

By JEFF OSTROWSKI, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 24, 2008

Find Palm Beach Homes: http://www.InvestFloridaRealty.com/search.htm

The region's housing picture remained gloomy in October, a month when prices continued to plunge even as sales volumes recovered.

The median price for a Palm Beach County home fell to $264,600, the Florida Association of Realtors said Monday.

That's down 24 percent from a year ago, off 9 percent from September and the first time since February 2004 that Palm Beach County's median home price slipped below $270,000.

Bargain hunters took the bait. Realtors sold 618 houses in October, up 37 percent from a year ago and up 18 percent from September.

"There's buyers out there who are buying, but the mind-set is they want a deal," said Bob Graeve, an agent at Illustrated Properties Real Estate in Palm Beach Gardens. Graeve, for instance, recently advertised a foreclosed home and got three dozen calls.

Even so, the number of October home sales didn't exactly soar - they simply returned to October 2006 levels.

Nationally, of the homes that did find buyers in October, nearly half were the result of a sale after a foreclosure.

That trend helped send home values down at the fastest annual rate since the Realtors association began keeping records in 1968. The nationwide median price of a home was $183,300 last month, down 11.3 percent from October 2007.

The Treasure Coast showed similarly plummeting prices, but with a rebound in sales volume.

The median price of an existing single-family home in Martin and St. Lucie counties was $134,600, down 33 percent from a year ago, while sales jumped to 383 in October, up 76 percent from a year ago.

Housing analyst Brad Hunter of Metrostudy expects Palm Beach County prices to fall another 10 percent to 15 percent, and he sees the housing market weakening, in spite of the sales volume bounce.

"It's good news if you're a Realtor," Hunter says of the uptick in sales. "More transactions fuels that business. But it's bad news for the home builders, because what it means is that there's more pressure on them in terms of how much price discounting they have to do to sell homes."

It can be bad, too, for sellers who are facing intense price competition among banks selling foreclosed properties and by short sales, in which the bank agrees to accept a price that is less than the balance owed on the property and forgive the difference.

Frank Ortiz first placed his 2,600-square-foot, fully remodeled home on the Miami market in September 2007, then took it off the market seven months later because of a lack of buyer interest.

He listed it for sale again this summer for $389,000, and despite lowering the price $10,000 and holding several open houses over the past few months, he's yet to get a nibble.

"I haven't even gotten a call with interest in the house," Ortiz said. "It's not like a dilapidated house or anything. It's a remodeled house."

His agent, Pam Mayers of Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell Realtors in Miami, says, "It's easy pickings for anybody buying a house right now. For sellers it's horrible. People are like vultures, flying around and picking whatever's left."

Eric Sain, president of the Realtors Association of the Palm Beaches, is urging his clients not to sell now.

"I'm telling my clients that if you can rent it and hold on, that's great," Sain said. "Most economists I've heard are looking for another 10 to 15 percent decline in prices before we hit bottom."

The housing market's meltdown has sent the entire economy into a tailspin.

On Monday, the Florida Home Builders Association said that as banks tighten their lending practices, they're pushing even solvent builders to "the brink of financial disaster."

"Not only are banks making additional capital calls, they are calling in loans not in default, eliminating lines of credit, and in many cases, altogether doing away with construction financing," Florida Home Builders Association President Jay Carlson said. "The current method banks are using to recapitalize is exacerbating Florida's economic problems."

Meanwhile, the National Association of Realtors is calling on Congress to approve $100 billion in incentives for home buyers as the housing market continues to crater.

Nationally, existing-home sales fell 3.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.98 million units in October, 1.6 percent below the 5.06 million-unit pace in October 2007, NAR said.

Find Palm Beach Homes: http://www.InvestFloridaRealty.com/search.htm

Courtesy: Palm Beach Post http://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/content/business/epaper/2008/11/24/1124homesales.html