Lionel and Tanya Lightbourne have been house hunting for 11 years — longer than they’ve been married.
They still haven’t closed a deal.
Their
credit is good. They’ve found financing. But skyrocketing home values
have priced them out of South Florida’s housing boom, even in the
inexpensive North Dade area of Ives Estates where they want to live. Too
often the old and creaky homes they can afford fail inspections
required by first-time home buyer mortgage programs.
“We’re
looking anywhere from $150,000 to $250,000,” said Lionel Lightbourne, a
social worker in Liberty City. “We’re finding stuff in our price range,
but we keep getting outbid.”
For South Florida’s middle class, the dream of owning is slipping out of reach.
Home
prices in the region are up nearly 45 percent since 2012, but local
wages have stayed flat, lagging well behind inflation. Cash-rich
investors, home flippers and foreign buyers are snapping up properties
before locals can get a foot in the door.
The high prices threaten South Florida’s efforts to entice new employers and attract young, creative workers and entrepreneurs.
For
now, as prices rise in traditional middle-class neighborhoods, buyers
are looking at once-overlooked areas that offer good value, even if
they’re not in the most fashionable parts of town.
Kelly Morello, a real estate agent based in Weston, said she often tells clients to broaden their search.
“There
are pocket areas that are within very good school districts and have
the right price points and good access to expressways,” Morello said.
“So many times buyers will say ‘I didn’t know this place was here.’
”
But those pockets can be hard to find.
You can’t be relevant if you don’t own anything.
Lionel Lightbourne, home buyer
A
person or family making the median household income in Miami-Dade
($42,926) can afford a single-family home in just 10 of the county’s 80
ZIP codes, according to a Miami Herald analysis of home value data
provided by online real estate company Zillow.
Experts generally say that you can afford a home that costs no more than three-and-a-half times your household income.
In
Broward, where home prices are rising more slowly and wages are higher,
the situation is slightly better: 11 of 53 ZIP codes are affordable for
single-family home buyers making the county median income of $51,608.
(That means the median value of homes in those areas is below $180,600.)
In many cases, affordable neighborhoods come with high crime, poorly rated schools or long commutes.
Many,
but not all. Using Zillow data on home values, school ratings from the
Florida Department of Education and crime statistics collected from law
enforcement agencies by the software mapping company Esri, the Herald
set out to identify well-priced neighborhoods in both counties with
average or better schools and levels of crime. Median values had to be
below $400,000, roughly what a highly educated young couple several
years into the workforce could afford. (According to the U.S.Census, the
median salary for a South Floridian older than 25 with a graduate or
professional degree is $60,688.)
In Miami-Dade, those areas include parts of
West Kendall,
Country Club/Palm Springs North, Hialeah, and the Miami neighborhoods of
West Flagler, Shenandoah, Coral Way and the Upper East Side. In Broward, sections of
Davie, Miramar and Coral Springs stood out, as well as the Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods of
Tarpon River and Shady Banks, and the
Driftwood section of Hollywood. (Click on links to read profiles of select neighborhoods.)
Other neighborhoods, such as
Allapattah,
stood out for their increase in value, driven by investors who are
betting current high crime rates will eventually drop, increasing the
area’s appeal.
An interactive tool created by the Miami Herald lets
potential buyers explore neighborhoods by median value — and see how
those areas match up on school ratings, safety and annual value growth.
We need space, we need good schools, we need a family area.
Daphcar Depaliste, home buyer
What buyers want
For many home buyers, schools are top of mind.
While
critics argue that A to F school grades handed out by the Florida
Department of Education say more about poverty than performance, the
ratings do have a big impact on real estate values. The better the
school grade, the higher the price for homes in that district.
“You
have to be buying at the $300,000 range to even think about good
schools” from elementary all the way through high school, said Robert
Sechriest, who wants to move his family from the Atlanta area to West
Miami-Dade or Broward and has been looking for several months.
His 7-year-old son suffers from serious allergies back home but breathes easier in the pollen-light air of South Florida.
“If
you can find a $300,000 house in a nice neighborhood with good schools,
you better act quick,” said Sechriest, who works for Delta. “Literally
you call your real estate agent with a list of 10 places you want to
look at, and if it’s more than two days since they’ve been listed, most
of them are gone.”
The hot market means the pool of affordable homes is shrinking dramatically.
To see the full graphic with yearly value growth for each neighborhood, click here.
Inventory
for homes under $300,000 stands at just two months, said Ron Shuffield,
president and CEO of EWM International Realty. A healthy market is
generally considered to have between a six- and nine-month supply of
inventory.
“We’re telling our agents that if they get a call for a
home in that price range, just take the listing,” Shuffield said.
“You’re going to sell it.”
Despite headlines about
celebrity mansions and
ultra-luxury condos, the real sweet spot for South Florida’s real estate activity is $300,000-and-under.
The
median resale price for a single-family home in Miami-Dade was $278,000
in July, according to the Miami Association of Realtors. Condos and
townhomes went for $195,000 in July.
$278,000Median price of a single-family home sold in Miami-Dade County in July.
In
Broward, the median single-family home cost $312,000 in July while
condos and townhomes sold for $137,000, according to the Greater Fort
Lauderdale Realtors.
But it’s not just run-of-the-mill homes that are selling out.
Laurie
Daresta said her 5-bedroom house near Parkland Golf & Country Club
in Broward stayed on the market for just two days.
“We sold for $1.14 million, and it makes me think we underpriced,” Daresta said.
Housing market blues
Study after
study shows South Florida is one of the
least affordable housing markets in the country.
That hasn’t always been the case.
For
most of its first 100 years, land remained plentiful in South Florida.
Bedroom communities sprang up around Miami-Dade and Broward, marketed
first for retirees seeking sun and then to families looking for the
American dream of a backyard, pool and two-car garage. The crime-ridden
years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Miami was a portal for
illegal drug shipments, kept prices unnaturally low for a seaside city.
When a bayfront home on Miami Beach’s North Bay Road sold for $3.2
million in 1981, it set a county residential record that went
unsurpassed for years.
Prices first started ballooning out of
control during the bubble of the early 2000s, fueled by easy credit. At
its peak in May 2006, the median sales price for a single-family home in
Miami-Dade stood at $379,700.
When the housing bubble burst in
late 2007, many economists thought South Florida would take a decade to
recover. But foreign investors smelled a good deal and pounced during
the recession with prices at 50 percent of their bubble-era peak.
In
2012, the market began to rise from its ashes. Flight capital from
foreign countries, the global attention spurred by Art Basel Miami
Beach, and the region’s value compared to New York, London, Los Angeles
and Hong Kong all helped put Miami on the jet-setter radar.
As
money poured into the region, South Florida became a destination for the
world’s wealthiest citizens to buy, not just spend the weekend.
Today
condos regularly sell for $10 million and more. And there are nearly
3,000 homes listed for $1 million or more, a 50 percent increase since
2012, according to EWM International Realty.
Miami
is the third least affordable housing market in the country, according
to an analysis by online real estate company Trulia.
But
because wages haven’t grown since the housing market began recovering in
2012, the latest real estate boom has driven home prices completely out
of whack with what locals can afford. To make matters worse, many
foreign buyers and investors offer all-cash deals, which carry less risk
for sellers than offers from buyers seeking mortgages. Cash deals
account for more than half of local home sales, although that’s down
significantly from highs of 65 percent and more in 2012.
In South
Florida, home prices are up 44 percent since 2012, according to the
S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. During that same time, average
hourly earnings for locals have grown by 10 cents to $22.70 — less than
0.4 percent. Inflation has been rising more quickly, growing by 1.5
percent between 2012 and 2013.
“What the market is doing is
providing housing units for people who don’t live here yet as opposed to
people who do,” said Frank Schnidman, a professor of urban and regional
planning at Florida Atlantic University. “The market is geared towards
people who want to purchase a second home or find a safe haven for their
capital.”
Many developers are now building luxury condos and
mansions at the expense of starter homes. They need to meet their
margins, they say, and with land and construction costs soaring, that’s
hard to do at the lower end of the market. Miami is now one of the
nation’s most overvalued and least sustainable real estate markets when
prices are compared to local earnings, according to property analytics
firm Corelogic.
To see the full graphic with yearly value growth for each neighborhood, click here.
The lack of affordable homes could mean the return of a problem local leaders thought they had whipped: brain drain.
“We
have to make sure Miami is affordable to our young professionals,” said
Stuart Kennedy, senior programs officer at the Miami Foundation, which
has targeted brain drain among other local issues. “This is the young
talent that we want to keep and bring into the city.”
Those
younger workers gravitate toward the urban core — the likely cause for
the increase in home prices in downtown areas and neighborhoods close to
city centers in both counties.
“There’s a national trend towards
young people coming back into downtowns,” Kennedy said. “The millenial
generations want to live in the downtown dense urban neighborhoods,
where they don’t have to commute and where they can walk to stores and
restaurants.”
If housing and transit costs keep escalating,
workers likely will be pushed farther from employment centers, worsening
Miami’s already
brutal traffic congestion.
“You’ll end up with folks having two-hour commutes one-way,” Kennedy said.
Already,
middle-class South Floridians spend nearly 70 percent of their income
on housing, commuting and utilities, according to a
study
published this week by Trulia. That makes Miami the third most
expensive housing market in the country after San Francisco and Los
Angeles.
Miami scores poorly even against expensive areas like New
York because wages are lower here and public transit harder to access.
That gap can have serious economic effects, experts say.
“When you
have workers spending so much on housing and transportation, it erodes
their power as consumers,” said Mekael Teshome, an economist at PNC
Bank. “That’s money they’re not spending on other things that could help
drive the economy.”
If the trend continues, local officials and business leaders
fear that Miami-Dade will face a
worker shortage similar to the one in the Florida Keys, where police officers, firefighters, nurses and teachers are in
short supply.
Many Keys resorts bus employees from Homestead. When Wal-Mart announced
plans for a 33-acre shopping center on Rockland Key earlier this year,
the company said it would need to build
200 affordable housing units for workers.
We sold for $1.14 million, and it makes me think we underpriced.
Laurie Daresta, home seller
The construction of new homes is already failing to keep up with job growth in South Florida, according to a
report
from the National Association of Realtors. Miami had the fifth-largest
disparity between job creation and home building in the nation, the
report found. Only San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego and New York City
fared worse.
With affordable homes so hard to find and the high
cost of windstorm insurance and property taxes an added burden, local
boosters fear South Floridians may simply pick up and leave.
Daphcar
Depaliste says she hasn’t found a home in Miami where she wants to
raise her two children — at least not one she can afford.
“We need
space, we need good schools, we need a family area,” said Depaliste,
who works in customer service for American Airlines and is renting in
North Miami.
That’s why she’s planning to pick up and move to
Ocala, where she has her eye on a two-story home with four bedrooms,
three bathrooms and a two-car garage, all for $174,000.
“That wouldn’t get me anything down here,” Depaliste said.
To see the full graphic with yearly value growth for each neighborhood, click here.
Closing the deal
When buyers do find a good deal, they have to move quickly.
Earvin
and Yudi West bought a pre-construction single-family house in Tamarac
before the development’s model home even opened up.
“It was a leap
of faith,” said Earvin West, who works in finance in Boca Raton. “Being
a young professional trying to find a home that’s affordable and has
all the amenities that we’re looking for, it’s pretty much impossible
unless you’re willing to go up to Lake Worth or Boynton Beach.”
While
real estate agents say that many young couples fix up the homes they
buy, the Wests work and go to school full time and wanted a move-in
ready home.
The couple searched for two-and-a-half years. When
they spotted a 3-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom house for $273,000 last year,
they knew they had to act fast.
“We weren’t finding anything
except townhomes for $300,000 or $350,000, which seemed insane,” West
said. They moved in earlier this summer.
Condos and townhomes
offer a more realistic option for many. The Miami Herald analysis of
Zillow data found buyers making the median income in Miami-Dade can
afford a condo or townhome in 27 of the county’s 80 ZIP codes. In
Broward, middle-income buyers can afford to buy a unit in a multi-family
building in 30 of the county’s 53 ZIP codes.
But many buyers have
their hearts set on a single-family home. That’s what their parents
could afford. Why shouldn’t it be the same for them?
Some
developers are going after those buyers. “We think there’s a void in the
market under $400,000,” said Michael Nunziata, division president of
builder Central Communities. “A lot of developers have run over to the
highest price point category and ignored that segment of the market.”
Central Communities, a subsidiary of developer
13th Floor Investments,
is building 715 single-family homes at three projects in Tamarac over
the next five years. Because land is so expensive, Central Communities
is focusing on infill development, Nunziata said. Its homes are located
on former golf courses.
“We have to get creative,” he said.
To see the full graphic with yearly value growth for each neighborhood, click here.
Building smarter
Andrew Frey, a developer and urban planning activist,
said
local governments should encourage developers to invest in mid-rise
buildings with fewer parking spaces, more units and better access to
mass transit.
“We need density of other kinds besides condo
towers or suburban gated communities,” Frey said. “There’s whole kinds
of urban neighborhoods that don’t exist in South Florida. .
.
.
We don’t have brownstones, we don’t have row houses, we don’t have
six-story walk-ups like in the West Village. We don’t have these
different kinds of [housing] that would achieve a dramatic increase of
supply in a way that’s on more of a human scale than 40- or 50-story
condo towers.”
There’s whole kinds of urban neighborhoods that don’t exist in South Florida.
Andrew Frey, developer
One promising sign is that home price growth is slowing down.
Home
prices in South Florida are growing at about a 9 percent clip in 2015,
compared to double-digit growth in the previous three years.
And
the market will likely keep cooling down. As currencies in Latin America
and Europe plummet against the dollar, foreign buyers are having a
harder time
affording local real estate. The percentage of homes bought with cash —
a good measure of foreign buyers and investors — fell to 54.6 percent
in Miami-Dade in May, down about 10 percent over the last year,
according to Corelogic.
That’s giving hope to home buyers like the Lightbournes, who are trying to make the best of their search .
“We
have house hunting dates,” said Tanya Lightbourne, who teaches third
grade at an elementary school in Miami Gardens. “We get food and look at
furniture and have a day out.”
Together, she and Lionel make about $85,000 per year. They know they should be able to afford a home.
“We
want something to call our own,” she said. “Renting is not a good
investment. I want something I can pass down to our children.”
Until then, they’ll keep looking.
Miami Herald staff writer Doug Hanks contributed to this report.
This
article includes comments from the Public Insight Network, an online
community of people who have agreed to share their opinions with the
Miami Herald and WLRN. Become a source at MiamiHerald.com/insight.
How we did it
To
identify well-priced neighborhoods in Miami-Dade and Broward counties,
the Miami Herald partnered with real estate data provider Zillow for the
month of June. Zillow provided sales data by ZIP code for single-family
houses and condos/townhomes in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The
Miami Herald selected ZIP codes with median value of $400,000 and below,
the upper limit that a college-educated, middle-class couple could
likely afford. The Herald then supplemented that information with school
ratings provided by the Florida Department of Education and personal
and property crime statistics collected from law enforcement sources by
the software mapping company Esri.
The seven neighborhoods
profiled here have schools rated B or better and average or low crime,
with the exception of Allapattah, which was picked solely for its
skyrocketing values.
Zillow’s home value data excludes
foreclosures and smooths out monthly variations in the types of homes
being sold. It is less accurate for the pricing of individual homes but
provides a better picture for larger geographic areas such as ZIP codes
and cities. It also includes data on all closed sales, not just those
from multiple listing services used by Realtors.
Bang for the buck
Values
in these areas have risen less than the county average over the past
year and meet all the following qualifications: Schools rated B or
better, average or low crime, and median value under $400,000.
Miami-Dade
- West Kendall
- Tamiami
- The Hammocks
- Kendale Lakes
- The Crossings
- Fountainebleau
- Westchester
- Northwest Hialeah
- South Miami Lakes
- Glenvar Heights (condo/townhome)
- Aventura (condo/townhome)
- Waterfront North Miami (condo/townhome)
Broward
- Hallandale Beach
- Sunrise
- Coral Springs
- Coconut Creek
- West Pembroke Pines
- West Davie
- Southwest Plantation (condo/townhome)
- West Deerfield Beach (condo/townhome)
Source: Zillow, Florida Department of Education, Esri
Hot neighborhoods
Values
in these areas have gone up more than the county average over the past
year and meet all the following qualifications: Schools rated B or
better, average or low crime, and median value under $400,000.
Miami-Dade
- Country Club/Palm Springs North
- South Miami Heights
- South Cutler Bay
- Hialeah Gardens
- East Hialeah
- Shenandoah
- Coral Way
- Upper Eastside (condo/townhome)
- El Portal (condo/townhome)
- Miami Shores (condo/townhome)
- Pinecrest (condo/townhome)
Broward
- East Davie
- Driftwood
- Shady Banks
- Lauderdale Isles
- Riverland
- Tarpon River (condo/townhome)
- Central Pembroke Pines (condo/townhome)
- West Miramar (condo/townhome)
Source: Zillow, Florida Department of Education, Esri
Good deals
These affordable areas had the year-over-year highest value gains, regardless of school grades or crime.
Miami-Dade
Broward
- Lauderhill
- Oakland Park
- North Lauderdale
- Margate
- Tamarac
- Pompano Beach
Source: Zillow, Florida Department of Education, Esri
Reprint courtesy and copyright by The Miami Herald.
Excerpted from Miami Herald article that originally appeared here:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article35702148.html
Original article written by Nicholas Nehamas nnehamas@miamiherald.com
