Tallahassee Condo Market Leads The Way In Stability

The Florida Association Of Realtors released reports this week showing the Florida condominium market is still struggling. The end of year numbers for condos (download the Florida Condo Sales Report) showed a statewide drop of 10% in condo unit sales and a 20% drop in median condo sales prices.

Seeing this report made me wonder how our Tallahassee condos sale has done. For the purpose of study, I've lumped condominiums and townhouses together (attached units) as I feel that they are perceived to be the same by buyers and sellers, therefore creating one market (single-family, attached homes). What I found was truly amazing.

Tallahassee Condo Sales Back To Normal

We follow the Tallahassee real estate market very closely here (in case you are a new reader), so I was not surprised when we analyzed the end of 2008 numbers in the Tallahassee real estate market. We saw unit sales of homes drop significantly again and this next picture does a good job (from right to left) showing that the market has dropped 56% from the peak of the market.

This real estate graph is interesting because it show single family detached homes separately from condo/town homes, but shows the combined residential market in one vertical measurement. For example, in 2008 we saw combined sales of residential units fall to 3,640 homes, whereas in 2005 the total number of sales was 8,243. But look really closely at the condo portion and what do you see?

Tallahassee Condo Sales Stable

Tallahassee condominiums and townhouses are now selling at the same level as 2002.  The booming market of the past five years took our condo sales to crazy highs, but we have returned back to levels that were normal before that time. The following real estate graph shows that the Tallahassee condo market seems to be stabilizing.

Tallahassee Condominium Sales Trend Same As July 2003

When we track the average monthly condo sales over time, we see that our current trend is the same as it was in July of 2003 (around 55 condo sales every month in Tallahassee), yet the average Tallahassee condo price has risen from $93K  up to $155K since that time.

Tallahassee Condo Prices Continue To Drop In 2009

So the good news is that we still have our historic demand for condos in Tallahassee, the bad news is that our supply is still very high. This suggests that we will still see pricing pressure on condos in 2009, but condo owners who price accordingly will be able to sell their units.

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