The first three months of the year delivered some good news for Palm Beach real estate agents and their clients, at least according to a new sales analysis commissioned by Douglas Elliman.
After several years of dealing with tight-as-a-facelift inventory, house hunters had more single-family properties and condominiums to choose among, the first-quarter report shows. In January, February and March of last year, 270 condos were for sale in the multiple listing service versus 320 in the quarter just ended.
Shoppers in the single-family segment, meanwhile, found 119 properties listed in the first three months of 2015, but 38 more this year.
Even as the market welcomed new properties, the supply didn’t overwhelm the demand: The prices at which houses and condos sold rose in a year-over-year comparison. That was particularly true for the highest-dollar sales that comprised the upper 10 percent of all transactions in the analysis.
“The market is still choppy, but one of the things we saw was more inventory coming on, especially at the higher end. We also saw a shift to higher-end properties and larger units being transferred,” said analyst Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers & Consultants, the New York firm that prepares the quarterly reports.
Consider the numbers in that upper-10-percent category, in which Miller lumped together eight single-family and condo deals. In the first three months of 2015, the median sales price was $6.56 million, compared to $10.55 million for the quarter that just ended — a hike of more than 60 percent. The median is the price at which half the properties sold for more and half for less.
Miller wouldn’t go so far as to say the numbers constitute a trend, but he was encouraged by the data, especially that percentage increase.
“It’s a big number,” he acknowledged. “At the higher end of the market, the properties that sold got farther way from the pack.”
Looking at sales across every price range, the year-over-year median price of condos rose from $552,500 to $702,000, although the number of units sold dropped, from 90 in the first quarter of 2015 to 45 this year.
On the single-family front, transactions stayed about the same — 28 in 2015 versus 24 this year. But median prices were up by nearly $440,000 to $4.7 million.
Miller’s outlook, however, was tempered by the fact “that the pace of the (overall) market was slower” — a number reflected in his report’s higher “absorption rate.” The rate estimates how many months it would take to sell every property listed in MLS at any given moment, given the current sales pace. To sell every condo listed in the first quarter last year would have taken nine months, on average. This year, that rate more than doubled, to about 21 months.
It was the same absorption-rate story for single-family properties — about 13 months in the first quarter of 2015 versus about 20 months this year.
Miller said those numbers likely reflect growing inventory rates, because buyers may be feeling less pressure to seize a property in a market where their options have suddenly become more plentiful.
Still, the numbers speak for themselves — especially when it comes to properties landing under contract, Miller said. In real estate lingo, those are referred to as “pending sales.”
“As a general rule, (the number of) closed sales is down, but new inventory is up. This isn’t in the report, but if you look at pending home sales for all properties, year over year, they were up 59.1 percent in the first quarter.”
Miller’s report only analyzed properties and sales listed in the multiple listing service, which means that it didn’t account for off-market deals unless they were added to MLS after the fact.
