Current State of Residential Real Estate In South Florida

Should you put a restriction on the purchasers ability to get a loan and therefore only look for a cash offering? Should you have any questions, please contact us at 954-384-6114

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, Attorney Roy Oppenheim and legal blogger. I want to talk a little bit today about what’s going on in the frothy real estate market, especially the residential real estate market here in Florida during the hot summer days here. And what we’re seeing are a number of factors. Number one, we’re seeing that interest rates have hit an all-time low. We’re seeing that the number of mortgage applications is actually precipitously dropping. We’re seeing that number of listings are actually going up. And we’re seeing that the number of people that are actually closing homes right now is dropping by about 20%. We’re also seeing that people are starting to lower their prices slightly. So we’re seeing all these different factors that are going on.

And so I guess the question is, if you’re gonna list your property, you know, what should you be expecting? I think what you should be expecting, and if you list the property at a very good price, you’re still going to get probably offers close to your asking price, or even more than your asking price. The real question is going to be is will the property appraise if, in fact, the person is going to be looking for conventional financing?

So that leads you to the question of whether or not you should put a restriction on their ability to either get a loan, and therefore only look for a cash offering, which would minimize the number of offers that you may get, or the alternative to…or in the alternative state that, even if they do get a loan and if it does not appraise out, that it nevertheless will be upon the buyer’s obligation to close as opposed to the seller’s.

We’ve seen numerous situations, over the course of the last several months, where people put their property up for sale, they prepare it to close, they sign a contract that’s subject to financing, the property does not appraise, they’re in boxes, they’ve already purchased another home, and what do they do? And it causes a lot of problems in the cost of litigation and causes a lot of stomach aches. And we certainly don’t want our clients to be put in that position.

So if you’re gonna list your home, you have to make sure that you have proper counsel and proper advice, and make sure that you’re getting a good deposit, a real deposit, you know, something around 5% or 10% would typically be standard. A lot of times, people are offering a lot less than that. And so you want to make sure that your buyer has some real skin in the game to make sure that if you could get a contract, that contract is going to close.

Please call us. Roy Oppenheim, from the trenches. Have a great day.