If you search Florida and real estate on Google, on YouTube, anywhere, you’re going to see a host of doom and gloom and a lot of people saying the marketplace in Florida has changed. Today, we’re going to focus on a lesser known marketplace in the Orlando metro area called Ocoee, Florida. And today, as I start into the data, I’m going to talk about exactly what’s going on, just like the rest of Orlando, the rest of Florida, there’s a big transition happening.

We are starting to see the marketplace, it’s shifting. Is it a crash? I don’t know. You’re going to have to watch and make that decision for yourself. 

But as we dive into the data, dive down below and smash the like button so as many people that might actually know about Ocoee and want to know just exactly how the marketplace is doing in this little sleepy town, we’re going to talk about it right now. So before I dive into Ocoee, let me pull up a chart of Florida. When I start these types of videos, I like to pull up and show the actual state or the entire central Florida marketplace to give you some context for which to look at the actual marketplace that we’re looking at. 

So let’s just dive in real quick and look at Florida. So this is on the left side, you’re going to see April 2024 data, and then we’re going to look against a year ago. So here we are, we’re up about 5% over last year across the state of Florida. Good news. Cash sales are up 6%. Cash as a percentage of closed sales is really kind of flat. 

It’s up 1.9. Median sale price in Florida is up 3.6. The average sale price in Florida is up 9%. Take that, doom and gloomers. Dollar volumes up 14%. That is the total amount of money, transacted volume, that closed. But let’s jump all the way to the bottom of the chart. You can see down here, months of supply of inventory. 

This is actually the true measure of how fast your market is, and this is going up rapidly in Florida. You can see that a year ago, we were at 2.9 months of supply. You say, Jared, what the heck does that mean? It means if you stop listing homes in Florida based on how fast we’re selling them, how long would it take to sell everything off? Well, 2.9 months was last year. 

Right now, it’s five months. That is much higher, and as it goes, if that continues to climb, you will see a lot more price reductions in Florida. Why is this happening? Well, look at active inventory. The amount of active supply was 94,000 homes in Florida. It’s now 155,000 homes. That’s not good. 

Penning inventory means it’s gone under contract, is down almost 8%. New listings is up 25%. There you have it, folks. A lot more people deciding to sell this year over last year. It’s a 25% increase in people putting their homes on the market. At the same time, pending, which is people actually saying, oh, there’s a house here. 

I’m going to buy it. That volume is down. That’s not a good thing. Penning inventory going down means that in all likelihood, in the future, closed sales is going to be down because pending leads closings. It goes under contract, then it sells, and ultimately, you’re starting to see a little bit of a pullback in what buyers are willing to do in the Florida marketplace. Now, let’s jump to Ocoee by comparison. 

Well, here we go. April, 2024. Look at this, folks. Ocoee has got a nice little bump in sales over the past few months. 31% over last year. That’s a nice amount whenever you see that we just saw Florida as a whole was only up 4%. Ocoee is well overperforming. Look at where the buyers are coming from. You have a 67% increase on that most recent month of data we’re looking at here where cash sales bumped in Ocoee. 

It was like 10 of them. It was like 20% of all sales were actually cash buyers. Now, in Ocoee, the median sell price is up 5.2%. The average price is up 5.5%. Dollar volume is up 38% and look down at the bottom of the chart. Remember that months of supply? Remember how I showed you a chart that said last year we had almost 3 months to sell off and this year in Florida it was 5 months to sell? Look at Ocoee, folks. It was 1.1 month of supply last year, meaning incredibly tight inventory.

Very little available. If you stop listing more, there’s nothing for people to buy. It would be gone in a month. That’s a very tight inventory by comparison to the state. This is why I want to show you this. We start seeing Florida’s bad news. 

Look at it now. It’s 1.9 months of supply, which is still kind of rated as a hot market, even though it has climbed 72%. Even the hotter parts of the state are still trending with the state because the statewide went up 72%. Ocoee also went up 72%. You remember active inventory in the state of Florida was up something like 70%. Active inventory in Ocoee is up 54%. So we were around 52 listings in Ocoee last year. There’s now 80 active listings. Why? Let’s take a look at our new listing inventory. 

New listings in Ocoee are not incredibly high. It was only 54 last year. It was only 56. So there’s not a massive influx of new homes hitting the market. Whereas you’ll remember when I showed you the state of Florida, there was like 25% increase in the amount of people actually saying, you know what? Enough’s enough. I’m not keeping my house anymore. I’m going to sell it. You don’t see that in Ocoee. You have 6% in new pending sales. 

Our pending inventory, by the way, pendings are flat even. Well, that begs the question for me, why is active inventory so high? If we have closings up, which I showed you at the top of the chart, look at closings are up 31%, which means, okay, we are absorbing the property. Pendings are steady and we’re really not seeing an influx of new listings this particular month. 

Let’s take a look at some charts so we can dig in and see exactly what’s going on in Ocoee right now, because the data is not making clear sense to me. All right, now we’re back in Ocoee. I’ve run the data. 

I’m going to show you a couple different graphs. This is 2024 on the far right edge. This is where we are right now going all the way back to 2017. So I’ve got a good amount of data here to show you. So you can see closed sales, closed sales are up 31%. It’s been a banner month on the most recent month of data that I’m showing here. 

By the way, this is SunStats. This is provided data source for all realtors. You have to have a license to log in, actually view all this, but this is the backend data for really, I can pull up anything in the state of Florida, but look at this. 

You’ll notice it was a banner month, 55 home sales were up 31%, but that’s not been the story. Look at this. It’s really been below 50 units for a long time, several months at under 50 units. 

Remember we know COVID exploded everything and we had all this volume of inventory because of low interest rates, but look at history. Most of Ocoee sells around 60 units, give or take. Sometimes it’s 70, even 80 units and sometimes it was a little bit lower, but most of the time you can look in history. There are more than 60 units sold on any given month. Look at this. 

Going back to 2022, you have almost two straight years where we didn’t even reach the line at 60. So there’s actually been a lot fewer sales. As you start to see inventory increase, you’re seeing a lot of news is like, oh, there’s so many homes in the market. 

If there’s so many homes in the market, inventory goes up. It’s going to be saturated. Okay and that’s going to be a problem. Well, we haven’t necessarily seen that in OCOE. So look again, let’s look pre-COVID because obviously when COVID hit 4%, 3%, 2% interest rates, we bottomed the market out where there’s nothing for sale, but look where it was in history. 

In history, there’s around 125 homes on the market for several years running. Now we came off of the floor. We were down at 30 units active, and it’s come all the way up to about 80 units now. 

So it’s had a steady climb over the past year and a half to where it’s at 80 units, but still it’s not high as it was in history. So you have less buyer activity. Buyers are like, forget it.