"Every single year, we see people coming in and paying more money for property than the year before," says Broward Property Appraiser Marty Kiar.
The average cost to buy a house has kept increasing this year, a reflection of the high demand for homes in South Florida.
The latest sign came Thursday, when Broward Property Appraiser Marty Kiar told county commissioners how the county’s average sales price for a single-family home has gone up to about $866,000 this calendar year. That’s up from $825,696 last year.
“We have very little inventory” in built-out Broward, and with that low supply, there’s demand, Kiar told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “Every single year, we see people coming in and paying more money for property than the year before,” Kiar said.
So what happens from here? “Anything could happen in the real estate market,” Kiar said. “It’s very possible if it stays on this track, we could definitely hit the $1 million sales price average.
“If you look at the trajectory, so far we haven’t seen sales prices go down. If we continue on this trajectory we could possibly hit that in a few years.”
The average home price in Broward is higher than the median price, considering there are outliers including the multimillionaires’ houses. The median sales price is $638,000 as of Thursday. That’s up from $620,000 in 2023.
“Unless you go to downtown Fort Lauderdale, where they are building straight up, there’s not a lot of places you can build single-family homes,” Kiar said. “Families are moving in from other states, other countries, and paying top dollar for our single-family homes.”
Palm Beach County also has seen rising values this year. The median sales price for single-family homes alone in the county is $670,000 for 2024, an increase from $665,975 in 2023.
The high numbers might not last forever, though.
“I wish it was inaccurate,” said real estate agent Whitney Dutton of Native Realty, of the high numbers. Dutton, who has the majority of his sales in Fort Lauderdale, sees how people with more money — the “high earners” — are buying the average single-family homes.
“It’s because the people who are moving here are wealthy,” he said. “It’s not the median blue-collar worker moving to South Florida. It’s the self-employed business owners with larger incomes that are moving to the area. The demographic of the people moving are high earners, high tax brackets.”
And while people from the Northeast are still a “top migration pattern,” he’s seeing more people come from Miami-Dade County, who are leaving condos that are getting slapped with high assessments, instead choosing more control in a single-family home at a more reasonable cost.
And Dutton said he doesn’t think the numbers will climb in the region forever. A larger inventory means prices will at least stabilize: His research found 845 single-family homes available for sale recently in Fort Lauderdale, versus more than 500 at this time last year.
“More inventory combats the price,” he said.
Among those unloading their homes: owners of vacation-rental properties that aren’t as popular these days, given that would-be customers now have more post-COVID travel choices. And he’s also seeing people who own second homes in South Florida and are trying to sell them to get rid of increasingly high property taxes and high home insurance costs.
“They are getting increases with insurance and taxes to the point it doesn’t make sense to own it,” he said. “They might say, ‘Look, I used this house twice last year, we don’t need it.’ ”
Kiar said he worries what the future holds if the numbers keep going up for the recent college graduates who need to find a place to live.
“I’m truly concerned (about) first-time homebuyers, younger people, who want to live here,” he said.
When Broward has such high sales prices, it could mean “brain drain — you lose your best and brightest people elsewhere.
“You want teachers to stay here, you want firefighters to stay here, you want people to make a life here. But if they can’t afford to live here, they leave and they go elsewhere and that’s my biggest concern when you see these types of sales prices.”
Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com. Follow on X, formerly Twitter, @LisaHuriash
