Winter Garden Housing Market Sees 10% Drop as Unsold Homes Reach 12-Year Record

Key Points:

• Winter Garden recently hit one of its highest records for active unsold homes, nearing levels not seen since 2017, signaling a shift toward a buyer’s market and creating increased competition among sellers.

• Median home prices in Winter Garden have dropped significantly from last year, with an 11% decline year-over-year, reflecting a slowdown in price growth and more price cuts across listings.

• With rising unsold inventory and declining pending sales, buyers are gaining leverage, leading to more price adjustments and discounts as sellers strive to close deals.

• The $1 million+ luxury home market in Winter Garden faces a surge in inventory, with nearly six months of supply. As high-end buyers opt for homes under $1 million, sellers in the luxury segment are adjusting prices downward to attract interest.

• The $600,000 to $999,000 price bracket is seeing growing inventory and demand, indicating a market shift where previous luxury buyers are moving to mid-range properties, leading to a more balanced supply in this segment.

Record High Unsold Homes and What It Means for Buyers and Sellers

Winter Garden last month just posted the highest number of active unsold homes sitting on the market than at any point in its 12-year history save one single month back in 2017. Whether you’re looking to buy in Wintergarden right now, you own here presently considering when it just might be the best time to sell it, or you’re just curious about the housing market in one of the most popular areas in all of the Orlando metro area. The housing market of 34787 has seen an unrelenting boom going back several years as this area attracts people who are looking for a charming small town feel with a lot of the modern local amenities.

The area allows you the chance to jump on a freeway really fast. And then with the West entrance to Disney World on our side of town, it makes it very convenient to visit the park almost anytime you want. But today we’re going to do a deep dive in the data and you’re going to know exactly what is going on in the housing market.

I’m even going to make some predictions going into the fall. So if you appreciate the hard work and dedication this channel provides to make sure you understand what’s going on in Orlando metro area, jump down below, smash the thumbs up. I’d be grateful for you.

Falling Home Prices, Rising Inventory, and Market Forecast for Fall 2024

Let’s get into the update. Let me start by showing you what is going on with the median sale price. Cause if you look at this, this is a pullback version, January of 2020. You can see at a glance that it starts down here at about 308, 9,000. It surges to the middle of June, 2022, where it hits $660,000. This is where the federal reserve started raising the rates and ultimately pushed the 30 year fixed much, much higher.

As you can see, as a result from here, it spent a lot of time actually below its peak number, hit it again, July of last year. But one thing you’re going to notice is look where we are July of this year. One year later, we actually fell off a normal peak cycle. This is one of the first things I want you to try and digest. We go into the rest of the data. You can see January of 2020 starts down here, and then it picks up to the middle of the Then the following year, January of 2021 starts down here and it ran unabated all the way to the middle of the year.

Even continued beyond that, because this is when we had two and a half and 3% interest rates. The following year in 2022, look at January of 22, look where it starts 561 pushes all the way up till June. And then July hits 627,000, which again was a big improvement over the start of the year at 561,000 in 2022, January of 2023, we start at 579,000 again and last year we peaked out at $676,500. Now as you follow the natural cycle, what I just showed you through winter garden, that makes you really scratch your head. You started the year at 652,000 for median sale price and instead of ending somewhere up here, maybe just short of $700,000, we actually fell way below the starting point. And the marketplace saw price soften to $608,000, which again was well below same time last year at $676,000. Not to mention that back in May, we’re at 641,000 and for the 60 days that followed price just got softer and softer to where it is right now. I already let the cat out of the bag. And I told you at the beginning of this video that unsold inventory is at record high numbers.

Now, as a result, more sellers are competing with other sellers and ultimately price is taking the head. So Jared, you say we have a lot of inventory, but we’re going into the fall and winter season. Aren’t those slower turnover times where buyers a little less active? That is ultimately the case and if this number continues to track down, we might see some of the lowest numbers this fall in terms of median sale price that we’ve seen possibly going back to mid to late 2021. We’ll have to see how it unfolds. Now let’s look at the home price forecast.

This takes in consideration recent price appreciation, how long it takes to sell, current inventory levels in winter garden, and how much price cuts are taking place. You can see the dotted line. It’s kind of the 50 yard line between being in a seller’s market and being in a cooler buyer’s market.

You can see that 2018, 19, and 2020, this was more or less very neutral territory between buyer and seller interest rates went down to two and a half percent. Ultimately it was a very strong seller market, but you can see now that the tables have swung. And in the past year, winter garden has fallen to become a very much a buyer favored market.

Price Cuts, Overvaluation, and Buyer Advantage in 2024

Now the index has this at a 36. And again, remember I said 50 kind of cuts down the middle. I will tell you that the weakest number I ever see in the Orlando metro area, which might be some of the Davenport areas, West Kissimmee, things of that nature. You’ll see it hit around 26 or 27. Those are the most buyer favored markets. So this one’s a 36.

All that means is if the inventory levels in this particular marketplace stay where they’re at, there is likelihood for continued price cuts and a chance that there’s going to be continued softening price here in the winter garden marketplace. This is year over year home value growth for winter garden. You can see that right now it is currently really close to the zero line.

It’s currently positive showing a 2% year over year on the Zillow chart. Okay. That you’re going to see in a second, I’m going to show you the Florida association of Realtors data from the Realtors board, which actually suggests a little bit different.

Zillow’s index includes a lot of other things like new construction that’s in the mix for this particular number, but you can see the meteoric rise through the pandemic era for this particular market. Much of the markets look the same, and you can see in 2022, this is right when the interest rates started to climb. There was a little bit of a price drop off and then the marketplace here in seven, eight, seven, just trudged on further. But if you take a closer look at the past eight months, you’ll see a slightly different story. Let me show you what I mean.

You can see back in history as we’re coming into the early parts of 2022, this was the end of this month over month over month price leap and three, four, seven, eight, seven. As you tighten the numbers down even further, you can see that over the past year, it’s largely been flat. And here, as I showed you from the Realtors board data early on from April on, there’s actually been no advancement in price.

It’s actually been sellers giving more up month after month in order to sell. And again, that’s happening during the hottest seasonality of the market. That’s when things are usually not so favorable for the buyer.

You can see in this case, the buyers are actually getting it over on the sellers and having the advantage at sale just because they have the strength of negotiation from where the market finds itself right now in this market. Winter Garden’s home value has grown by 64% over the past five year span. When factoring the basic fundamentals of income versus the cost of housing here, the ReVenture app is showing that this is 12.6% overvalued.

So that’s taking the actual census data for the income levels in this particular marketplace. How much does it take to actually afford living here? And that’s what the data shows. And I might add that if you’re in three, four, seven, eight, seven, you’re like, Jared, you’re throwing things at the TV because you’re like, we’re not overvalued by 13%.

Clermont over here has a reading of 25.3% and Windermere is showing 40% overvalued. And again, some of that’s going to be skewed because this is a luxury market. For some owners in Windermere and even in Winter Garden, money’s not necessarily an obstacle to anything, but fundamentals do matter because not every house in these areas are luxury and maybe one of the biggest challenges is right now you need to make $144,000 in salary to afford the typical home price in the Horizon West Winter Garden area. Now, the graph you see in front of you is the percentage of price cuts for all listings in Winter Garden. Currently, 32% of all listings in the market here have experienced a price cut.

As you can see, you have to go all the way back to 2018 to find any point in the history of this particular marketplace where there’s this high level of a percentage of price cuts taking place in order for sellers to sell their home. Now take a look at this amazing stat. This is the median list price year over year.

So in a healthy market, you’re typically putting a house on the market this month, a little above what you were selling it for a year ago. That’s the theory of median list price. When median list prices and sellers are bringing homes into the marketplace, they’re asking less than prior year.

That’s a sense that sellers are a little concerned as well as their brokers who are helping them list the house. They’re looking around and seeing the marketplace and they’re saying, you know what, we’ve got to bring the price down against last year in order to sell. This is typically a leading indicator of what homes will eventually close for in the future against last year.

This is a very important stat you want to watch. Now this month in Winter Garden, the median price of a home is hitting the market in the $590,000 price bracket. The same time last year, it was at $658,000.

Represents a 11% decline, which is pretty big. To make a point of comparison up here in Ocoee, you have four tenths of 1% positive. So it’s slightly above zero against last year and same thing in 34711. It’s just barely hanging on six tenths of 1% over last year. You can see that month after month in the history of Winter Garden, it’s always above zero, but you can see that something between April and May and remember, look at the sole price. You almost saw a dead match to corresponding prices in the market from April to May and then June. And then July, you could see the price.

It wasn’t holding anymore. It started to soften. So when that happens, the sellers are seeing that in the marketplace and they start making adjustments on the front end to the asking price and you can see it falling quite a bit below last year to where it is now. All right, I’m jumping over to another product. This is only available to licensed realtors.

Rising Unsold Inventory, Declining Pending Sales, and the Impact of Interest Rates on Home Prices

This comes directly from the Florida Board Association of Realtors. First thing I’m going to show you, this is the data point that I teased in the beginning. You can see the far left side of this graph is January of 2012 to now.

What you’re looking at is unsold inventory. This inventory spikes higher and higher when more sellers are either dumping a lot of listing inventory in the market and having situations where buyers are not able to keep up with all that inventory. And ultimately, pendings are dropping, activities off. So what you see now, this number is at 416 units this month. Actually got a reprieve and sold some off in July. What we have now is we’re at 416 units.

You have to go all the way back to this one little spike in September of 2016 to find a time when there’s this much unsold inventory in the market. You can see going back five or six months in the beginning of this year, it has just gone straight up. Next I want to show you is pending inventory.

This is the leading indicator that shows you how closings are going to be in the future. Let me show you a pre-pandemic number. You can see a little white square on the screen that says July 19th pending inventory was 207 units. Yet here we are at the bottom. You can see that this end of the chart, and it represents five or six months of a downward plummeting direction, 182 units pending. Again, that is a number well below pre-pandemic levels and there’s a lot more homes out there. There’s a lot more buyers to be able to be buying homes in this particular market because the marketplace in Winter Garden, is it bigger or smaller than 2019? You guessed it. In all reality, if we ran 205 units or 207 units pending in July of 2019, we should probably be at 250 to 300 pendings this year.

We find ourselves at 182 units dead flat stagnant to last year, which again, we all know last year was pathetic sell-off. Let’s get our heads around where pendings are going because look at this chart. This is the 30-year fixed chart going back to May 1st, the opening of May interest rates were 7.4%. And you can see going from May into June, they actually dipped below 7% and into July, they stayed below 7%. You can see, however, most of July, these interest rates really did not come below six and three quarters. So interest rate much through the sales data you’re looking at was 6.75, 6.8, something like that and now it’s half a percent better than that. So it’ll be interesting to see if there’s any reprieve from the interest rate when we finally get August data. All right, next chart we’re looking at is closed sales and herein lies another problem.

This is obviously why you have unsold inventory charting at 400 plus units, because you can see over the history of time, if you look at the logical direction of how big this market has gotten, just the size of the area, you can see that really our closed inventory was heading this direction. Okay, so it should have been somewhere in here.

At this point in time, you can see that going back here to 2023, we’ve been barely at times getting over 150 units sold in a single month, oftentimes languishing below 100 units total. And at this point in time, for the amount of homes that exist in Winter Garden, this is just a very anemic number of closings. Take a look at this next chart.

This is median percent of original closed price. You can see that in the history of Winter Garden pre-pandemic, we’re usually 98%, somewhere around there. You can see that we’ve fallen and it’s been dropping for about four straight months to where it is now at 96.8%. We posted in this range twice back in 2023, but you have to go back four or five years before you start to see postings this low and all this tells us again is kind of what we already know. Price cuts are happening. That’s obviously taking and lowering the percentage that sellers are getting to list price and then beyond that, you’re having some issues most likely where buyers are pulling a little harder in order to make a deal and sellers are caving. And ultimately the percentage of what a seller can ask, what they can expect is going to drop. Now this my friends is probably the most important statistic of the entire video.

Winter Garden Luxury Market Faces Inventory Surge and Price Adjustments Amid Shifting Buyer Trends

This is your months of supply. You could see right now that it’s sitting at 3.3 months. If you look at the error right before the pandemic from 2018 to 2020, this marketplace sat around 2.4 months. So it is elevated against that. You can see that some of these earlier months, way back here after the GFC, that there was elevated numbers of inventory. It was just slower and it took forever to sell.

There’s most likely still short sales and things of that nature trickling through the backend of this data. But you can see going seven years back, we are presently at the highest number that we’ve seen during that stretch of time. But ultimately months of supply is a measure of how many homes you have on the market and how many you sell in a given month.

You divide the two. Essentially what happens is it tells you if you were to stop listing any new homes and just sell off what you got, how long would it take? Historically a healthy balanced market is usually considered anywhere from three to four months. Some people would say it’s even five months.

I would say that’s pushing, especially in a marketplace like this, where if you look at pre-pandemic history, it was unusual for them to even hit three months of supply because of the pace of this particular market. It’s a growth market. So it’s currently elevated.

Now for some bonus data, I broke down the price brackets and looked at all the data individually. This video would be enormously long if I went over all of it, but let me share some things about the luxury market in Winter Garden right now. The $1 million plus bracket is seeing a collapse and it’s pendings, which is highly unusual for summer.

Usually there’s a big sell-off in luxury home inventory through the summer here. This is what we’ve been seeing recently as we’ve seen a growing segment that’s plus $1 million. Also, the luxury bracket has an elevated months of supply.

Very important. You just saw that I showed you the entire zip code is around 3.2, 3.3 months of supply. The $1 million plus bracket is now burgeoning close to six months of supply, which is incredibly high for recent history and some things to consider there’s between 75 and 80 properties out of that 400 unit active inventory that are in the $1 million plus bracket. There’s only 12 pendings in the entire zip code. Also keep in mind out of 12 pendings, three or four of those are going to cancel the contract, which leaves you with nine or 10 units, which will most likely close over two months of time into the future, which means you might only see five or six closings in a single month coming up in August out of 70 plus active homes on the market.

I’m also noticing a trend where the $600,000 to $999,000 price bracket, again, the bracket right beneath the million dollars is growing. It is getting a lot more inventory, which tells me that a lot of those 70, 80 homes that are actively plus 1 million, they were dreaming a dream. And now they’re bringing the price down and they’re going under a million dollars, but there is definitely a stalling out happening in the plus $1 million range.

There are definitely some communities that will still command a million dollars plus, but in my estimation, there are many, many active sellers, and maybe even those putting their home on the market soon and the 1 million plus price point in three, four 77 that are dreaming a dream. They will never command that price point in that marketplace ever again, unless there is a resurgence and the other direction. And what I think is going to happen and what is happening right now as we shift into the fall, maybe even going to early 2025 is you are going to see a lot of homes that are 600 K to 999 dropping into the four to $600,000 price point. And as I mentioned before the $1 million category dropping into the category just before it. So Jared, Jared, Jared, stop it right here.

Are you telling me that the 1 million plus buyer is just leaving winter garden? They’re not buying there anymore. No, no, no. I’m telling you that the luxury class of buyers are shopping more in the six to 999.

The same people a year ago or 18 months ago that would have been almost exclusively confined to a million plus now has a growing base of supply available to them and more opportunity that they find appealing under the $1 million price point. So conversely, as I told you, $1 million plus now has nearly six months of supply. Meaning you don’t list anything over a million takes you six months to sell off and probably going to get a lot worse.

Wouldn’t surprise me if you see seven, eight months of supply million plus because you’re going to see closings dwindle to nothing in that category. If things stay as they are right now, that marketplace is heavily cash dependent. Now on the other side of things from 600 to 999, you’ve got a 3.3 months of supply. That’s right. You have a higher end price point that is running on trend of the entire zip code. And that just tells me that there’s a healthier base of buying and selling going on from 600 up but that does not mean just because your house has sits in some subdivision and you’re more of a typical home price that you’re going to demand the higher end of that range anymore.

You’re starting to see a shift across the zip code and as more of those 1 million plus homes that were previously 1 million plus start to crowd into that next category down, everybody scoots down to accommodate because you’re not going to outdo a nicer, bigger house, just how it works. So in summary, I think you’re going to see a lot more trading in winter garden between five and 800,000, probably big, big numbers that this particular market hasn’t seen and I think you’re going to start to see a lot less of a density of transaction volume at the very, very upper end. And I’m sorry if you’re under $400,000, there’s hardly anything in this particular zip code for you. I look to see if the trends are shifting at the very bottom of the price points, and it’s just not taking place here yet.

By the way, if you are looking to buy in a home in winter garden, you’re going to want to know exactly what’s going on with the changing insurance crisis climate here in Florida. If you’re curious about the most recent update, things are changing. Things are even getting better in a lot of cases, but if you’re insured here now, there are some definite warnings you need to be paying attention to so that in the future, if you get a claim, you don’t get your fingers slammed in the door and end up with nothing.

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