Daytona Condo Market
– What is your ideal condo?
I ask this question when I get a call from condo seekers. They tell me about bedrooms, view, pets, potential rentals…This helps me to narrow the search down to a few dozen, rather than a few hundred condos. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get all the details from the prospective buyers before taking them out to show condos?
And then we get frustrated that we show one condo after another. I am sending them listings, they look at them, tell me which they like, or which would not work for them.
By the time we narrow down to 3-4 condos that seem to work best, they ask whether there are other similar condos… It is like, “well, I got the list of condos which might be the best fit. But do you have something not as good?”
Of course, there are quite a few other condos, but 99% of the time buyers want to look again, which is often the sign that they might need to stretch the price range. It is usually that all the features they want, and the location, and the class (the level of luxury) can’t be found in the price range they have set…
It is all about the expectations, which mostly reflect yesterday’s market. If their limit is $250,000 and they would like to buy a condo in Oceans Six or Oceans Eight in Daytona Beach Shores, that is not going to happen, it is yesterday’s expectations of the market. Unit there are solidly in the $300K+.
Why I did not send them listings in Bella Vista or Ocean Vistas condominiums? Because the starting prices there are way higher than what they told me the plan to spend. They are beautiful buildings, but they are much more expensive.
All this would have been easy but…
We base our expectations on what we know about the market. In ever changing markets we base our expectations not on today, but practically always on the past. What the condos were selling for when we were in Daytona last year, what a friend of ours paid for his condo here 2 years ago, what we read in the newspaper about foreclosures in Florida a few years ago…
But the market changes. When it slows and the inventory builds up, prices are falling, it is rarely ignites the interest of out-of-state buyers. We generally do not like depressed markets. What if it falls even more? What if it never rebounds?
But after even the longest night there is a day. Inventory is decreasing, prices are on the rise. It is far from the crazy increases of 2006-2007, very far from it. But it is no longer 2011-2012, when Daytona condo market was scraping the bottom.
Ladies & Gentlemen, Daytona Condo Market train has left the station. It is still slow, but gaining speed. Yes, the prices of 2012 are history, but prices of 2020 are not yet here, and instead of being upset that you would pay double of what buyers paid in 2011, it is a great time to buy a condo in paradise for half the price of 2020. And then in 2010 you would be proud that you bought it for such a fantastic price.
