The dwindling supply of new units and the price cuts in the Hollywood/Hallandale Beach submarket within Southeast Broward County have led to a 22 percent increase for the first nine months of 2011 in condo resales for the area.

As a public notice recently published in The Miami Herald announced, part of the discussion at the November 17 public hearing to be held by Sunny Isles Beach City Commission will center around a proposal for a new condo tower. The tower, proposed by Porsche Design Residences, may end up taking the 2.2 acres where the Golden Nugget Beach Club & Hotel currently stands, in Northeast Miami-Dade County.

After a brief sabbatical, the 30-year FRM is back in familiar territory, falling below 4 percent for the second time in as many months.
Motivated by the Federal Reserve’s “Operation Twist,” which involves the Fed buying billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities to increase the money supply and spur investment, the 30-year FRM had fallen to a historical 3.94 percent in October, the lowest ever on file.

Global real estate provider Realogy saw a revenue of $1.2 billion for the third quarter of 2011 – a 10 percent increase from last year’s third quarter revenue.

Downtown Miami is making a comeback as the hot-spot for developers looking to erect new condominium towers. In the next couple of years, six new condo projects are scheduled to begin construction, and developers have been dropping hints about several others to follow.

Sales data coming out of Miami and greater Florida lately has been good; in fact, it’s been better than good. In September, year-over-year sales in Miami for both existing single-family homes and condominiums rose 46 percent and 58 percent, respectively, while statewide sales posted impressive yearly gains of 10 percent for single-family homes and condominiums.

Why would “no” be the answer real estate agents are looking for from clients? More than 80 Broward and Palm Beach master brokers learned the answer to this question, and explored one of South Florida’s newest condominium projects, at a Master Broker Forum (MBF) that was recently hosted by Promenade in Boynton Beach.

For years, renting was seen as the more cost-effective alternative to owning, and generally, the viewpoint made sense. Renting lacks the property taxes, upkeep and other fees that often come with owning a home, and the skyrocketing prices of the boom years doubled down on those advantages.
 
With the boom a thing of the past, though, and houses at their most affordable level in 40 years, new CoreLogic data reported by Steve Cook of Real Estate Economy Watch is shedding new, unexpected light on the affordable nature of renting.

According to a recent CondoVultures.com report, lenders in the tricounty South Florida region are once again filing an increasing number of foreclosure actions–the first time since the “robo-signer” controversy was uncovered in September 2010.

According to the most recent jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor, the economy added 103,000 jobs in September, and though markets reacted to the data in a lukewarm fashion, a true bright spot in the department’s findings came from the construction sector, which comprised 23,000 of those added jobs.
The greatest gain in seven months, construction has added 53,000 jobs in 2011, a welcome recovery after losing 150,000 jobs last year. Only health care, professional/business series and information technology added more jobs in September.