Winter Park, Maitland markets on mend

Despite a still fragile economy and the country’s blemished credit rating, many experts have faith the housing market is still moving in a positive direction.

“Anything that’s priced right, I’m getting offers on them, sometimes even multiple offers,” Maitland Re/Max real estate agent Mike Rance said. “It’s a great time for a buyer to buy, but you have to be ready to pounce when you find the right property.”

Recent reports on the housing market also confirm Orange County is slowly starting to conquer recent obstacles thrown its way.

According to the Mid-Year Hillman Report, home transactions for the Greater Orlando area were up 2.53 percent over a comparable period last year and inventory was reduced to a 4.7-month supply.

Overall, sales and prices of existing homes in Orange and Seminole counties also performed better in some of the more established neighborhoods, particularly in Maitland, where non-lakefront home transactions climbed 32 percent.

“There are a lot of positive things going on,” said Scott Hillman, president of Fannie Hillman + Associates, a Central Florida real estate company. “Prices are up in some areas and stabilized in others, but the fact that inventory is shrinking is a big deal.”

He also said he believes Orange County is ahead of the rest of what the nation is feeling, in terms of getting short sales and foreclosures flushed out.

Michael Kidd, executive vice president of Orlando Regional Realtors Association, agreed that he is seeing fewer distressed assets dominating the marketplace and that the past six months have been a balanced market.

“We have seen financial institutions take a much more aggressive approach towards working with buyers and sellers,” Kidd said. “They’ve facilitated a much more fluent transaction then we saw in the previous two years.”

According to ORRA’s market statistics, since January of this year, Orlando’s median price has increased by 23.3 percent, bringing Orlando’s overall median price to $117,000 in July. The median price is also 7.64 percent higher than the $108,700 recorded in July 2010.

“The market is starting to show the best signs now that I’ve seen,” Kidd said.

Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness, said sales are improving this year from the first quarter to the second quarter, but the key to real improvement is the labor market.

“The state of the housing market going forward is really intertwined with the labor market, and until we start seeing some significant job creation and see the unemployment start to make a steady decline downward, I think it’s going to be hard for the housing market to make a full-blown recovery,” he said.

Snaith said the signs of improvement are there, and the labor market will pick up, but the progress will be very slow.

“As long as we have high unemployment and weak job creation, we are going to continue to have problems with foreclosure, and limit potential buyers, because now it turns out you have to actually have a job to get a mortgage, so an improving labor market helps on both sides of the housing market,” Snaith said. “It helps boost the command and slows the growth and supplier of foreclosures, so those two markets are really tied together.”

But for some Orlando real estate agents, a stabilizing market is the encouragement they need.

“I think we are far ahead in correcting our market then those other markets around the country,” Kidd said. “Just six months ago, we were taking a very negative approach to talking about decreasing values in the Orlando area, and we’ve reversed that completely.”