South Florida and Miami Residential Real Estate Outlook 2009

South Florida's commercial and residential real estate markets suffered in 2008, and the New Year doesn't figure to offer much relief. Continued foreclosures and weak economy will continue having an impact on prices and number of properties available with only aggressive sellers disposing of properties.

Although home sales started picking up this summer, the beleaguered housing market has been hammered by foreclosures and falling prices. Meanwhile, the sputtering economy has local businesses retrenching and cutting jobs, dealing a blow to the retail, office and industrial sectors. All this carnage creates an opportunity for those positioned to take advantage of the adjustment in prices, and higher expected returns.

What follows is an outlook of the region's residential markets as 2009 approaches:

Residential Real Estate

The three-year housing slump may ease by this time next year, but the real estate market in Florida, particularly the Miami real estate market almost certainly will still be in decline. After a five-year boom, South Florida's housing market began to tumble in 2006.

People who stretched to buy properties they couldn't afford have been forced into foreclosure over the last two years. Homes have lingered on the market for months as prices are driven down and as tightening credit makes it difficult for buyers to get financing.

But, although it might seem that we must be almost finished, there's still a lot of pain to come in terms of write-downs and losses that have yet to be recognized.

The trouble now is that the insanity didn't end with sub-prime mortgages. There were two other kinds of exotic mortgages that became popular, called "Alt-A" and "option ARM." The option ARMs, in particular, lured borrowers in with low initial interest rates - so-called teaser rates - sometimes as low as one percent. But after two, three or five years those rates "reset." They went up. And so did the monthly payment. Now the Alt-A and option ARM loans made back in the heyday are starting to reset, causing the mortgage payments to go up and homeowners to default.

With defaults at unprecedented levels and no evidence that the default rate is tapering off, it will lead to further foreclosures, homes being auctioned, and home prices continuing to fall.

Analysts that have looked back at what was written in '05 and '07, the reset dates and the current default rates, predict the beginning of a second wave. Billions of dollars in sub-prime mortgages reset last year and this year, but what hasn't hit yet are Alt-A and option ARM resets, when homeowners will pay higher interest rates in the next three years. The damage is substantial if one considers that the sub-prime is approaching $1 trillion, the Alt-A is about $1 trillion and then option ARMs are probably another $500 billion to $600 billion on top of that.

To get a sense from where we have come Broward County median price for existing homes declined by 35 percent from November 2005, Dade County by 33%. The overbuilt South Florida and Miami condo market has taken an even bigger hit. Median prices on existing condos have fallen more than 40 percent in the two counties since 2006.

Home sales in South Florida started increasing in July, bringing a hint of optimism, but the upswing was caused by months of falling prices in a market still flooded with homes for sale. Rates on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages have been low and last week hit 5.19 percent, a 37-year low, contributing only slightly to the uptick at best.

However there is a sense that the opportunity may be arriving for some. First, individual buyers that have been on the sidelines renting property suddenly feel that foreclosures are closer to what their incomes allow them to purchase. Also, corporations such as Lennar, a large South Florida multifamily developer that like all others has been hurting is positioning itself to take advantage of the market. First, Lennar's strategy includes hoarding cash -- it had $1.09 billion in reserves as of Nov. 30 -- and second, it is establishing a fund aimed at buying distressed residential properties.