The U.S. List Price Has Fallen Nine Months Straight. Florida's Single-Family Price Rose 3.7% Anyway.

The country got a discount. Florida got a raise.

The national median list price fell 2.4% in the year to July, the ninth straight month of annual declines, according to Realtor.com's July housing report. Over the same stretch, the statewide median price for an existing single-family home in Florida rose 3.7% to $425,000, per Florida Realtors' July data. Same country. Opposite direction.

That gap is the whole story for a Florida buyer right now. The softening everyone reads about in the national press is real, and it is happening somewhere else.

The divergence is not about cheaper money

Start by killing the easy explanation. Florida is not buying because rates dropped. The 30-year fixed averaged 6.66% in the August 27 Freddie Mac survey, a hair above the prior week's 6.65% and actually higher than the 6.56% it averaged a year ago. Freddie Mac's own chief economist framed the national picture as a "more balanced housing market," built on more listings and slower price growth. Accurate for the country. Wrong for Florida.

Florida single-family sales rose 5.1% in July, the 11th straight month of year-over-year gains, and new pending contracts, the leading indicator that tells you what closes in the fall, rose 2.4% for a 12th consecutive month. Buyers are stepping in at a rate that is flat to a year ago, into prices that are up. That is not the behavior of a market waiting for a break. It is a market that already decided the break is not coming.

Where the softness actually lives

National inventory tells you exactly where the buyer's market moved. Active listings rose 2.1% year over year in July, but the growth was regional: the Midwest was up 9.3% and the Northeast up 8.3%, while the South was essentially flat at down 0.2% (Realtor.com, July). Zoom into the metros and Florida is on the wrong end of the list for a bargain hunter. Jacksonville posted a 20.0% annual drop in active listings and Miami a 16.9% drop, the two sharpest inventory declines among the 50 largest metros in the country.

Fewer homes, more buyers, higher prices. Florida single-family supply sat at 4.5 months in July. Six months is the rough line between a buyer's market and a seller's market, and 4.5 is not close to it.

The list-versus-sold distinction matters and I am not going to hide it: the national figure is asking prices from Realtor.com, the Florida figure is closed sale prices from Florida Realtors. But the direction is the honest part. Asking prices nationally have fallen for nine months. Florida's closed prices rose. When both the ask and the sale move against a buyer, the buyer is not the one with leverage.

The condo is the exception, and it is on a clock

There is exactly one place in Florida where the national story holds, and it is the condo. Condo-townhouse supply stood at 7.8 months in July with the median flat at $295,000, the only major segment in the state that still reads as a buyer's market. That leverage is real today, and it is thinning: condo sales rose 11% year over year in July even as the price held. A segment that clears inventory that fast while prices stay flat is a discount with an expiration date, which is a case we have made before.

The move

If you are shopping for a single-family home in Florida and holding out for the price cuts you keep reading about, you are waiting for weather that is happening in Minneapolis. The national median list price is falling, national inventory is climbing, and none of it has crossed the state line into the house side of Florida's market. At 4.5 months of supply and prices up 3.7%, the discount is a statistic about somewhere else.

Put the leverage where it exists. On single-family, compete for the home now and spend your negotiation on terms rather than a fantasy list-price haircut: a rate buydown, closing costs, a repair credit. If a flat-priced buyer's market is what you want, the condo side is still handing it out at 7.8 months of supply, for now. And if you have been timing the purchase to a rate cut, the math has already answered you: rates are higher than a year ago and Florida prices climbed anyway.

Sellers, the mirror image. Price to the rising sold median in your own metro, not to the national gloom in the headlines. The buyers proved in July that they will pay it.