Some in South Florida regret sitting on housing market sidelines

Now, buyers find homes are $100,000 more expensive.

FORT LAUDERDALE — As South Florida home prices spiked during the pandemic, some people decided to put their home shopping on pause in the hopes that prices might drop, a decision they are coming to regret.

Now, a year-and-a-half into record price growth and dwindling inventory, non-buyers are stuck in a precarious situation: They want to buy but are facing higher prices than they did when they first started searching and are finding themselves at risk of being priced out of the South Florida real estate market.

“They feel like they made a mistake at some point, and they feel like they can’t catch up because the market is so far ahead of them that they can’t get back in,” said Alicia Cervera, of Cervera Real Estate in Miami.

Allie Sinbine and her husband, Steve, were among those who decided to try and wait out the real estate market after they started looking at homes in June 2020. They put their search on pause a month after shopping, thinking it was likely that homes prices would start to lower toward the end of the year.

“We assumed that with the New Year and the election ending, we would start to see things level out and they would come back down to where they were,” she said.

Instead, home prices just kept rising, further pushing the couple out of the housing market. They are looking for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in the $250,000-to-$300,000 range, but as prices have continued to climb, they’ve expand their search beyond Palm Beach County, farther north to Port St. Lucie. They’re exploring new construction homes and considering that they may have to up their budget a little bit.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2021/12/26/some-in-south-florida-regret-sitting-on-housing-market-sidelines/

I think this housing market is different than 2007. There's too much money sloshing around and there are historically low interest rates, along with Boomer retirees looking for warmer climates; that combination points to continued house price appreciation in the Sunshine State at least in the short term.