In different times, the automatically generated email from real estate site Zillow.com that I received at 3 a.m. would have had me popping open a bottle of Dom Perignon for breakfast. My "Zestimate," which is Zillow talk for an estimate of a home's value, indicated my Connecticut house had appreciated by a healthy 2.8%, or $17,000, in just the last 30 days.
If only.
Later this morning, I read that the index of pending home sales had risen 6.3% in December, and was up 1.6% in the South, which of course is this web site's area of concentration. The pending sales report followed an earlier report that home sales had jumped 6.7% between November and December, the biggest such gain in seven years.
On the face of it, these are positive signs for a battered market, but
Part of the Florida housing market stinks, literally
Florida homeowners can't catch a break. Some real estate experts believe it could be as long as two decades before the Miami market, especially condos, returns to anything resembling normalcy. That may be an overstatement, but who among us would double down on a Miami condo today, even at almost giveaway prices? A dark mood has overtaken other markets in the Sunshine State. I've been participating in online discussion boards dedicated to the Carolinas, and I wish I had a dime for every time a post begins with the words "I am relocating from Florida..."
Now the Wall Street Journal, in today's op-ed column, paints a vivid disaster scenario for state residents. All it will take for that scenario to play out would be for a Katrina-like hurricane to come ashore in the Sunshine State.
As we reported here, State Farm Insurance bowed out of the Florida
And then there is the lawsuit that major homebuilder Lennar has brought against drywall manufacturers in China, alleging that the gypsum in the sheetrock it has put into hundreds of its customers' homes in Florida emits a rotten odor and is also messing with the electrical coils in air conditioners. Similar problems are alleged in Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama as well.
It all makes one wonder what Florida has done to deserve this. Come to think of it, Florida seemed just fine prior to 2000. Could this be the curse of the hanging chad?
