Floria Real Estate Prices Hit Bottom?

Report:

"North Port was hurt because there was so much speculative building," said Arthur W. Broslat, land and investment property specialist with ReMax Alliance Group. "These guys had these schemes where you put down $3,000 and they built you a house. Gulfstream Construction built 500 houses like that in North Port and nobody had any intention of living in them. A mess of houses built in North Port were purely speculative."

Englewood existing home sales held value the best in Sarasota and Charlotte counties with an average selling price of $174,000 -- down only 7 percent from a year ago.

No data was available on DeSoto because its population is too small for Zillow to track.

All is not lost in North Port and other overbuilt areas. Sales of intact, foreclosed properties are red-hot and as they disappear from the market, property values are expected to stabilize, Broslat said.

"The new houses in North Port will disappear," Broslat said. "The recent foreclosures that haven't been trashed, the turn-keys you can move into in North Port, are going off the market a week or two after they've been listed. They are going off the market very quickly."

Reflecting the foreclosure trend, one-third of all Florida homes sold in the past 12 months sold for a loss, and 14.3 percent of all homeowners have negative equity, according to Zillow.com.

Distressed sales -- foreclosures and short sales where the bank takes less than the amount owed to satisfy a mortgage -- accounted for as much as 40 percent of all real estate transactions in the third quarter, which pulled down the median sales price.

The news is not all bad. Existing home sales are trending up.

For the first quarter since year-end 2005, the Florida Association of Realtors reported existing single-family home sales were up 5 percent in the third quarter. A total of 32,203 existing Florida homes sold in the third quarter compared with 31,558 during the same period a year ago.