PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — Real estate experts say the signs are showing the housing market is cooling off.
“Longer marketing times, fewer properties that sell during a given marketing period, the number of bidding wars go down,” said Ken Johnson of the real estate initiative at Florida Atlantic University.
Real estate agents say they’re also seeing it.
“The last couple months you do an open house and 50 to 100 parties walk through, now it’s a little more normalized 5 to 7 parties,” said Anthony Salerno of Prime Home Realty in Wellington.
But as sales seem to slow, in part due to rising mortgage rates, prices in South Florida are not falling much.
“We’re starting to see a little more around people reducing prices her and there but it’s still if you look at the average asking price it’s still higher historically,” Salerno said.
“What we’re getting away from is this double digit or 20 percent year over year increase, that’s unrealistic,” Johnson said, which does still present an unaffordable barrier up for many buyers looking to get into the South Florida housing market.
“It’s probably going to be a sellers’ market not like we saw for the last year or so, but we will probably be in what we call a sellers’ market for the next year or two,” he said.