There are so many houses for sale in Florida — the equivalent of one out of every seven in the U.S. — that a national housing analyst is warning that the Sunshine State’s “market is flashing warning signs.”
The post by Parcl Labs co-founder Jason Lewris states that nearly 45% of Florida listings have taken a price cut, a number that 6.6 percentage points above the national rate, with just over 10% of home priced below what the owners paid.
That puts Florida at a 5.8 on the real estate research and analytics company’s “Motivated Sellers Index,” a measure of how recent sales compare to list prices. The U.S. is at 5.1, meaning the seller of a $450,000 home would typically accept $11,565 below list.
Some places in Florida are even higher. Tampa, along with Sherman, Texas, top the company’s list of most motivated markets in larger cities at 7, still short of the 7.5 measure that divides “motivated” sales from “fire selling.” By comparison, Utah is at 5.2.
It can be hard to compare Florida’s housing market to the rest of the country, according to Dejan Eskic, a senior research fellow at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute involved in housing, construction and real estate research.
“Florida is a little bit of a messy market,” Eskic said, due to the state’s many second homes as well as a big increase in homeowner association fees to cover new safety regulations put in place following the deadly collapse of a massive Miami-area condo building in 2021.
Plus, he said Florida has ranked No. 1 nationwide for the number of homes for sale by state as a share of the national total, followed closely by Texas. A decade ago, Florida held the top spot with around 10% of the nation’s homes for sale, Eskic said.
This year, that number reached nearly 18% in January and February but is currently at 14%, or about one of every seven homes for sale in the United States, he said, noting there are about 364,000 fewer homes on the market across the country today than in 2016.
Over that same decade, the number of homes for sale in Florida went from under 145,000 to around 155,000, Eskic said, “so their inventory didn’t explode, per se. It’s just that their share is now higher.”