A three-year supply of condominium apartments remain unsold in the overbuilt South Florida market. And that's not counting units that lie west of Interstate 95 or the thousands of condo units owned by investors.
As of March 31, according to a new report from CondoVultures, a Bal Harbour-based real estate consulting firm, some 6,800 condo units near the Atlantic seaboard in the tri-county South Florida region were still awaiting buyers.
That figures does not include units that are languishing in the less desirable nether sectors of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties west of I-95. Nor does it include the more than 8,000 units that have been purchased in bulk transactions by investors who will eventually resell them one at a time to individual buyers.
Since 2003 when the real estate boom began, developers have erected some 250 projects with 49,000 units in the seven largest condo markets east of I-95, according to the consulting firm.
As indication of just how wild things got in South Florida, a look back shows that in the entire four decades prior to the boom, builders created 700 condo properties, with a total of some 76,500 units in the same seven coastal markets: Greater Downtown Miami, South Beach, Sunny Isles Beach, Downtown Fort Lauderdale and the Beach, Hollywood/Hallandale Beach, Downtown West Palm Beach and Palm Beach Island, and Boca Raton/Deerfield Beach.
"At the current pace of about 200 new condo sales per month, or 600 units per quarter, the tri-county region has nearly three years of remaining inventory," says Peter Zalewski, a principal in the consulting firm.
Despite the inventory overhang, though, Zalewski reports that some developers are already taking steps to secure land and governmental approval to launch new projects in the near future. It is not clear whether those properties will be for sale condominiums or rentals. But an educated guess suggests that while they will be marketed as rentals, they will be designed for conversion to condo ownership at some later date.
