Very Interesting Real Estate Facts about Palm Coast and Flagler County
One of the most affordable places in Florida and in the U.S.; with so few listings and so many Realtors® we could staff an Open House at every listing six days a week.
PALM COAST, FL – November 11, 2015 – There are currently 855 single-family residential Flagler County homes listed for sale via the Flagler County Real Estate Association’s Multiple Listing Service (MLS). That’s the lowest inventory level in two years. But the number of agents has grown during that period. It’s now hovering around 1,100.
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Look at it this way. We have more than enough agents to staff an Open House at every listing six days per week. Of course that would take a lot of scheduling and it’s not likely to happen, but it highlights an obvious imbalance. I know agents or agent teams that are carrying more than 20 home listings, implying that many agents have none.
Home Affordability
A recently released Coldwell Banker Home Listing Report compares the average listing price of 81,000 similar-sized four-bedroom, two-bathroom homes in 2,722 different markets across all 50 states.
Newport Beach led the list as most the expensive U.S. market with an average listing price of $2,291,764. (Only one Flagler County home sold for more than $2,000,000 in the past 12 months.) Cleveland, Ohio, brought up the bottom, ranking 2,722th with an average listing price of only $74,502 (not including a snow-blower). Palm Coast ranked 2,092nd with an average listing price of $196,653.
Doral led Florida with an average list price of $552,399. Hastings was at the bottom with an average list price of $95,267. Palm Coast ranked 90th of 127 markets analyzed within Florida.
SERIOUSLY, it costs more to buy the subject home in 76.8% of the markets studied across the country than it does to buy the same home in Palm Coast. And 70.1% of the Florida markets included in the study are more expensive than Palm Coast.
Perhaps Palm Coast’s general beauty, access to uncrowded beachs, sunshine, trail system, championship golf courses, sports venues, excellent schools, Interstate access, job growth and population growth are a turnoff to prospective buyers.
Or maybe we just need more real estate agents.
*Be sure to listen to me and co-host David Alfin on our weekly half-hour radio show, Real Estate Matters, every Sunday morning at 9:00 on WNZF News Radio. David and I discuss a wide range of real estate topics. Listen on 1550 AM or 106.3 FM or streaming live at https://player.listenlive.co/36561. Past shows can be found at https://www.flaglerbroadcasting.com/wnzf/#archives.
Home prices in Palm Coast
We have recently traveled to 12 different locations in Florida in search of a new home. We have been in Palm Coast since 2000 and want to move on as this is the longest we have lived in one place. The prices in Palm Coast are being artificially held down by Agents and Appraisers, this is borne out by the fact that home prices in the 12 cities we visited where any where from 50% to 200% higher than my comparable home in Palm Coast. We could not find another waterfront property in a decent neighborhood for less than $500,000. The ones we found where outdated and need extensive interior and exterior remodeling. I can only conclude that some thing is rotten in Palm Coast and I see no other rational reason than Real Estate Professions attempting to coral the market through price controls.
Missing Stats?
Great article, Toby. Thanks for the info. But some data may be missing. I challenge the negative inference about agents who do not have many listings. Many like me concentrate on working with Buyers.
For example, I sold a Seagate house and was paid a good commission. However, our MLS classifies my income as a referral fee from Seagate, not a commission. It is not recorded as a “sale” for me. I believe this is the case for all new home sales by real estate agents.
The proportion of listings vs the number of real estate agents is generally true; but one needs to also consider that some real estate agencies (and this includes the largest one in Palm Coast) have many listings that are generated by the brokers themselves who list houses that their agents then sell. So I could have no listings but sell one house a month of my broker’s listings.
And there are team member agents such as some who work for Keller Williams who just work with buyers and have no listings in their name.
And then there are brokers who find they get more marketing clout by putting all listings in under the brokers name.
And there are many “House Listings”.
I work primarily as a “Buyer’s Agent” and do very well-generally having only 1-3 listings to which I give much personal attention.
The market is moving toward Listing Specialists and Buyer Specialists and Team Administrators; but the long standing bias at the Agency and the MLS level is still toward getting listing contracts.
Minor points to a good article I will be passing on, but my comments are worth knowing I think.
Ted Lesher
Conspiracy?
Should be pretty easy to get 1100 agents, most of whom are fighting for a commission to get together and decide to hold prices down. Am sure they don’t want higher commissions if prices rose.
And someone planted explosives in the World Trade Center then got a group of Saudi terrorists to fly airplanes into the buildings. The other two were just to throw us off.
Good Times Ahead
I totally agree that Palm Coast is a wonderful place to live or retire. I look forward to the near future when home prices correct and I can enjoy the smart investment I made.
Not So, Toby
With so many lenders vying to make home buyers loans, it would be almost impossible for anyone to hold down prices. Certified appraisers come from other communities, so have no basis for the appraisal except recorded sales. The waterfront property in Palm Coast, though lovely, is really not navigable. In order to go outside, you have to travel north to St. Augustine or south to New Symirna Beach. There is no good employment base in the community, so most of the residents travel to Jacksonville or Daytona to work. It doesn’t make sense to think that Real Estate licensees keep the prices down – higher prices mean higher commissions. The market will always dictate what will be paid for a product – remember the dictates are Desire for the product, being able to use it for the intended use,scarcity of the product so that demand stays lively and the seller being able to transfer a good and marketable title. The amount paid for any product is what a buyer is willing to pay and a seller is willing to accept. Palm Coast went through a long time of short sales and foreclosures, and that has affected the market recovery. There is no reason to believe that the real estate licensees prefer to sell a low cost rather than a high cost property.
Real Estate
Kathleen, your response shows simply how naive you are. Several places I visited, Cape Coral, Fort Dunard, Fort Myers just to name a few have worse problems as far as ocean access is concerned. Cape Coral has locks, bridges and up to 20 miles of no wake zones. Fort Dunard is in land on the Waterway between Stuart and Fort Myers, at least 50 miles to either coast. As far as selling low dollar versus high dollar property, as a former Real Estate Agent, I can tell you that the lower the price of homes, the more potential buyers you have. Just look at the average DOM of million dollar homes. I got out of the RE business before the bubble hit and it was the best decision I ever made. RE is a dog eat dog business where only 10% of the agents make little more than minimum wage. Making $18,000. gross for a million in sales leads to the poorhouse. The only people who might have a chance of success is a Broker who has 20 people paying their own way and getting 50% of the commission on all sales. This is why there are more former RE Agents than there are people buried in cemeteries, sooner or later Brokers are going to run out of victims to exploit..