Good Afternoon Everyone,
Hope you’re enjoying this brisk day and bright sunshine. We’re all lucky to live and work in South Florida….
Our 2014 sales are off to a great beginning. You collectively have written contracts for over $180 million in new sales and leases over these past three weeks. At the pace of your activity, it appears that this is going to be EWM’s best winter season in history. Congratulations! And… this is on the heels of averaging a million dollar+ sale every 17 hours during 2013…. ranking EWM #1 among its Miami-Dade competitors. I know the kind of effort that it takes to produce this level of activity. I appreciate what each of you is doing to serve your customers and to build your business. Your hard work reflects positively on the entire EWM family. We are certainly poised for another great year.
Each time we were together throughout 2013, we discussed the need to add more inventory in almost all sectors of the market. It took a few months to get the inventory growing, but the good news is that the combined inventories in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties grew by 24% last year… from 20,094 available units on Jan 1, 2013 to 24,961 available units on Jan 1, 2014. Most all of this growth occurred in the last half of 2013.
Our months of supply are still on the low side; therefore, we can still handle a bit more inventory…. but we need to keep a careful watch on the pace of inventory increases and the level of monthly sales over the remainder of the first quarter. Broward currently has only a 3.5 month supply of single-family home inventory and a 4.8 month supply of condominiums, while Miami-Dade has 4.6 months of single-family supply and 6.2 months of condo supply.
Remember that the optimum number of inventory supply is 6 to 12 months, so there is still room for some additional appreciation this year. We’ll be keeping a close watch on the months of supply numbers, as changes in this metric will have a direct impact on market value changes. Broward saw a 25% increase in the median price of a single-family home last year, while the median price of a condo in Broward increased 27% during 2013. The median price of a single-family home in Miami-Dade increased 19% during 2013, while the median price of a condo in Miami-Dade increased 12%.
We have had double-digit annual median price increases for over 24 months for both single-family homes and condos in both counties, so we need to be careful in projecting continued increases at these levels. With the increasing inventories and new construction underway, median price increases will likely temper back in 2014 to single-digit levels. With the large numbers of new condos being offered at pre-construction (primarily in Miami-Dade), the number of available units will be increasing fairly rapidly over the next 24 months; therefore, we will be keeping a close watch on the number of newly constructed units, as well.
The attached reports offer a closer look at the overall markets in Broward and Miami-Dade, as well as the $1 million+ markets in each area. In addition, you will find attached a Worldwide Price Comparison sheet and Currency Exchange Rate Comparisons, highlighting the tremendous values that South Florida is offering to our friends from all across the world. Please feel free to forward all, or any portion, of this information to your friends and customers. Each of these 5 attachments contain 3 pages each, so if you download and print them all, you will have 15 pages of data.
Lastly, I wanted to share a report from Christie’s International Real Estate, which includes Miami with New York and London as three of the most vibrant world cities currently attracting the globally affluent buyer. Living in South Florida each day, we sometimes forget how the rest of the world is talking about us with a lot of enthusiasm! This is a very exciting piece for all of South Florida. The 9-page report can be accessed by clicking here.
Thank you again for all your hard work and extra effort that you put forth each day. We are all fortunate to have so many fine EWM professionals with whom to work. I’m proud to be one of our team members.
Enjoy our warm weather today…. and Keep Selling!
Ron