Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
New Coverage :  Asterisk  |  Call Center Outsourcing  |  Call Recording  |  SIP Trunking  |  Hosted Exchange  |  PBX
Webinars
Channels by Topic
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

TMCNet: Bargains drive up home sales in Broward County: With foreclosure glut, more price drops likely

[November 25, 2008]

Bargains drive up home sales in Broward County: With foreclosure glut, more price drops likely

(Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, FL Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 25--Even as job losses mount and mortgage lending remains tight, South Floridians still are buying homes.

Bargain hunters continue to respond to plunging prices, with October sales of existing homes in Broward County Click here for restaurant inspection reports rising 46 percent, to 625 from 428 a year ago, the Florida Association of Realtors said Monday. The median price plummeted 29 percent, to $252,500 from $354,000 last October.

Sales have shot up since July, but that doesn't mean the region's nearly 3-year-old housing slump is ending, analysts say.

The October figures reflect home sales contracts signed during the summer, before the financial free-fall on Wall Street. Prices are expected to keep dropping as long as the foreclosure problem persists.

"We would be lucky if the market bottoms out in South Florida in 2009," Miami-based housing consultant Lewis Goodkin said.

Broward's condominium sector followed a similar trend last month. Condo sales increased 30 percent while the median price fell 28 percent, to $115,200.

Distressed properties are popular targets among people trying to buy now.

Roger Palermo, a building maintenance supervisor for the city of Pompano Beach, said he looked at almost 50 houses. Many needed new roofs and other major repairs. And most were foreclosures or short sales, in which lenders take less than what's owed on the mortgages and forgive the remaining debt.

Overwhelmed with properties, some banks said they wouldn't consider Palermo's offers for three months or longer. One lender came back with a counteroffer higher than the asking price.

Earlier this month, Palermo and his fiancee finally bought a two-bedroom house in Boca Raton Click here for restaurant inspection reports after the previous owner's death. They paid $225,000, $34,000 less than the asking price.

"At least 75 percent of the homes for sale are either foreclosures or short sales and need a lot of work," said Palermo, 48. "But it's hard because you can't even get answers from the banks."

In Palm Beach County, October sales increased 37 percent, and the median price dropped 24 percent to $264,600.

Statewide, sales increased 15 percent last month, while the median price fell 24 percent, to $169,700, the Realtors' group said.

Nationally, sales fell 3.1 percent in October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.98 million units. The median sales price fell 11.3 percent from a year ago to $183,000. That was the largest year-over-year drop on records since 1968 and the lowest median sales price since March 2004. The median is the level at which half sold for more, half for less.

In South Florida, the recent sales momentum is helping reduce the number of properties on the market.

Broward County had a little more than 28,000 homes and condos for sale at the end of October, down 5 percent from a year ago, according to the Miami-based Keyes Co.

But demand still is lagging. It takes longer to sell a house in South Florida, an average of 172 days, than anywhere else in the nation, according to an October housing report from California real estate firms Altos Research and Real IQ.

"The inventory news is starting to get a little better, but the question is, how much more pressure are we going to get from new foreclosures that come on the market?" said Mike Larson, a housing analyst with Weiss Research in Jupiter.

Regardless, real estate agents here are enjoying the renewed interest among buyers, many of whom are coming from the Northeast.

"We're hoping for a really cold winter up north," joked Pamela Orr, an agent with Balistreri Realty in Lighthouse Point. "If it's priced right, people are buying."

Paul Owers can be reached at powers@SunSentinel.com or 561-243-6529.

To see more of the Sun Sentinel or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sun-sentinel.com/.

Copyright (c) 2008, Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]
› Return to Voice of the Customer Home

FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.
View All ›

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...
View All ›

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
View All ›
 
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend