Friday, March 18, 2011

Almost 1 in 5 Florida homes are empty

It looks like Florida won't have a housing recovery any time soon:
On Thursday, the Census Bureau revealed that 18% — or 1.6 million — of the Sunshine State's homes are sitting vacant. That's a rise of more than 63% over the past 10 years.

Having this amount of oversupply on the market will keep home prices depressed and slow any recovery.

During the housing boom, Florida was among the hottest real estate markets in the nation. Homes were snapped up by the state's growing population as well as hordes of investors confident that prices would continue to soar.
Meanwhile, the number of real estate licenses issued in Florida fell by 75% since 2005:
In the past six years, real estate licenses issued in Florida have fallen dramatically, from almost 47,000 in 2005 to 11,700 in 2010, according to the Florida Department of Business & Professional Regulation.

4 comments:

  1. I hope its not as scary as it appears.

    Dan Statlander
    http://www.statelandbrown.com
    (Real estate experts in Boca Raton Florida)

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  2. This is such a stupid article what it fails to explain is that one reason why so many homes are vacant is because a good number of these are 2nd homes.I guess the author does not think that people can own more than one home across the country and especially in FL.I live in Lee County and a lot of homes in my area are vacation homes when I walk our area I only see no vacant homes because of foreclosure but seem them vacant as vacation homes as the houses are too well maintained.Plus we have seen a steady decress in the number of homes foreclosures in our area over the past 12 months.

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  3. That is interesting Adrian. If the market is good, why have the number of real estate agents decreased so dramatically?

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  4. I'm in Martin County, FL and when this census data was reported, we went a little further into some of this data. It appears that the census criteria will identify some second homes that are not occupied as vacant homes, even though they are in fact second homes and used seasonally. This is a fairly large number in Florida and may be leading to some misleading census data.

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