A look at the Miami Real Estate Market in 2022. What happened? Is the market crashing like most headlines say? NO. We wanted to look at the market data specifically closed sales in 2022, and not just compare it to 2021 which was the "Perfect Storm" for real estate but to see how it did versus other "normal" years. This way it would give us a better idea as to how the market did in 2022. 2021 was an anomaly of a year and one that will go down in the record books, and also one we may never see again so to use that as a basis for comparison is really unfair as any data set compared to it will not paint an accurate picture. With the pandemic starting in March of 2020 we knew we had to look at the previous year which was 2019, but we also felt it was important to look at 2019 versus another normal year so we went back to 2018 market data to give us two years worth of "normal" data. We took a good sample size of data across the more popular cities and neighborhoods within Miami. Neighborhoods that we know well, and have been following for years, and also took different property types by looking at single family homes and condo's to give us a better reflection of what the market was doing. Let's dive right in to the graph... starting from left to right with Single Family Homes in Coconut Grove, zip code 33133 starting in the year 2018. The next column over is Brickell, and here we looked at one condo building, Jade Brickell, 1331 Brickell Bay Drive, and lastly we took market data from Miami Beach, specifically a condo building in South of Fifth, Murano Grande, 400 Alton Road, and also Single Family Homes in Miami Beach, specifically South Beach which is the 33139 zip code. Looking at 2018 and 2019 you can clearly see that the # of properties sold in Coconut Grove and Brickell increased, but over on Miami Beach they decreased. However what was clear across the board was that prices were decreasing steadily. Then comes 2020, and more specifically March 2020. We had a 1 in 100-year Global Pandemic shut down the entire world. Everything closed down, and we were forced to stay home and hunker down. What would happen in the Miami Real Estate market no one saw coming, no one. First off we were lucky as Florida was one of only a handful of states across the United States that remained "open". Then real estate was deemed an "essential business" which in the beginning didn't make much of a dent but once corporations realized that this was going to be a longer process than anticipated they started allowing their worker's to "work from home" which is what started an unprecedented wave of people moving to Florida especially Miami. This started in the 2nd half of 2020 here in Miami, and from that point it launched us into 2021 at such a fast and furious pace which allowed 2021 to be a record year for real estate sales in Miami, one we will probably never see again. I always emphasize that yes prices went up incredibly fast but what really impressed me was the velocity of sales, and the number of sales something we had never experienced in Miami. Looking at the sales data for 2021 across the board you can see what an amazing run it was. Yes prices increased but the # of sales was overwhelming. In some cases, you can see that the # of sales in 2021 was more than in the 3 previous years combined... that is crazy! So when you see news headlines out there stating that the market is crashing... you have to take a look to see what are they talking about? If you take the market data of 2021 and compare it to any other year which is what they do, it's an unfair fight. You can't take an anomaly of a year and then look at the sales data for 2022 and say "hey the market is crashing" that doesn't give you a true picture of the market. That is why we share this info with you and show you in black and white that 2022 in the Miami Real Estate market was a good year, a correction. The market is returning to a normal market where the # of sales will be more normal and while we can clearly see that prices have skyrocketed across the board we did see prices stop increasing towards the end of summer 2022 as interest rates jumped to 6%, and then around November jumped to 7%. This not only spooked the market it started a downward pressure on pricing across the board which we are still experiencing. Where do we go from here? In a couple of weeks we will be closing out the 1st Quarter of 2023, and will be able to compare it to 1st Quarter of 2022. This should show us where we are today and were we may be headed. We are facing some headwinds, including higher interest rates, and even this week we had the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. We do feel that the market will still be correcting itself so it will be interesting to see what happened this 1st Quarter. Hope we were able to provide some value. If you need any help with real estate in Miami or have any questions, I am always available to help. Talk soon.