You have the squeeze on an investor. You own this property, and you’re renting it out, maybe only making $1,000 a month, and all of a sudden, your rent’s dropping. And at the same time, you got a call from your insurance agent, and they said, surprise, your insurance is going up $450 a month.

Well, you’re like, well, that’s almost half my cash flow. Not to mention all the other factors that are involved. But one of the things I wanna show you, let’s look at Winter Park specifically, right? Real estate is incredibly local, so each of these marketplaces are gonna do vastly different.

What I’m gonna show you right here is we’re gonna look at some data in history. I like looking city by city and actually pulling the city’s history going back to 2012. The reason why in 2012, you were settling down from the Great Financial Collapse.

Inventory levels back here, if we had a chart going back a few more years, you’d see a little bit higher, but then all of a sudden, it started to come down, okay? So Winter Park proper, this is basically your inventory line is really around 200 units, right? I always like to pull pre-COVID because when COVID monetary policy hit, it obviously hit the floor right here after 2020, okay? But before that, we call this area of time normal. It’ll be interesting to look at Winter Park too because Winter Park is so built out that there hasn’t been a massive inflow of new units to mess up the numbers. Like you had this volume of units for a very long time and ultimately, you would need your active inventory to come up here for you to be in a sketchy situation.

So let’s take a look. So right here, you have your inventory fluctuating around 200, 200 plus, and you bottomed out around 40 units in December of 2021. And then when Powell hit the interest rate button and rates started to rise, even then, you didn’t really see a surge of inventory.

You’ve kind of been balancing around 90 units. So to me, this is unusual. So hats off to you, Winter Park.

I’d imagine there’s a lot of folks here that are very mindful of what’s going on in the market, very patient, probably not a lot of mortgage volume here. And so obviously, there’s factors there that people can just be patient. If there’s any market concerns or if there’s any timeframes where things get kind of murky, they just pull back.

Look at this. So median sales price, you can see it’s just kind of going along. Like if you were to cut a line right through the middle, Winter Park’s like 106, something like that and you can see most of this year, the median sale price in Winter Park is positive. So May was up five, April’s up 21, 24. And again, I like to look at median sale price, especially in a upper-end market like Winter Park, because if you look at average price, it gets skewed if you end up selling a lot of really expensive properties one month, or say one month, the townhomes in Winter Park is basically really all that’s sold.

So the average gets very volatile. Median is probably the closest way you can kind of balance the market out. But I’m curious to see, what is cash sales as a percentage of all closed properties in this market? How is that looking lately? Well, look, you can see it’s record high cash activity in Winter Park in a 12-year time span, okay? So you can see going back all the way to 2012 that this is obviously an interesting part for this market is mortgage rates is not playing a factor to the same degree that maybe it is in Castleberry or one of the other surrounding markets like Longwood.

You have very, very high cash interest. But let’s take a look at months of supply. I’m curious to see, is the market shifting at all? Because your inventory is so low that in this situation, the only thing that could affect it is buyers backing away, you know? So buyers have to really back away with such low inventory levels to swing your market.

It’s obviously low. So you have, Winter Park has one of the tightest markets yet in the entire marketplace for Central Florida, okay? So I’m a student of this. I watch it.

I’ve not shot a video on Winter Park yet. But this is fascinating, because look at this. You have all this.

This is your history of months of supply, okay? You run normally 4.95 months of supply. That’s your market homeostasis. That’s what you’re used to and look at this, which again, you have half the supply you’re used to running, which I will tell you is good, because in this marketplace, about all you can count on is your cash buyers in a high interest rate environment. You know, so as far as it stands right now, Winter Park stays around 100 units. You are not gonna probably have much price weakness anytime soon unless all the neighbors around you become a very real competitor from a price standpoint.

Let’s look at new listings. Are the new listings going up at all? And obviously you can see not really, okay? So again, I like to cut a line through the middle of the data and you can see that most of the time you’re running, you know, you’re up and down around 60. You spend several months a year above 60 units and several months a year where really close to 60 homes are hitting market at a time.

Look at the past two years, going back to 2021. There’s no time when this city has bumped past 60 units, okay? So this is why your inventory stays low. Look at this line right here.

This is, you’re used to playing here and there’s obviously a major lock-in effect going on in Winter Park. And as far as that’s concerned, I mean, if you’re a homeowner now, a lot of your equity’s on paper. Your investment here looks like it’s very stable for the meantime because there’s just obviously a diminished amount.

Let’s take a look at pendings. So pending inventory, is pending changing at all or is it stable? Okay, so it’s very stable. So you can see again, two years, there’s only so much inventory to buy up.

So around 40 units a month, give or take, is what’s being sold. But look at the volume. By the way, the realtors in this area are starving for business.

Because if you focus on this area, you’re used to playing up here. There’s a lot more transactions than the past two years. There’s a lot less marketplace activity.

Let’s look at median time to sell. Is it getting harder or easier or does it matter, okay? So you can see that in the past five or six months, it’s kind of broken out, maybe even past eight months or so. But again, it’s super low.

Most of the time, this marketplace is 100 days plus and you can see that going back at the past, I mean, you can see the bottom chart down here, there’s not a single timeframe where they’re anywhere near even 100 days. So in this marketplace, obviously you can see there’s major stability, which is good. I mean, if you’re here and you’re watching all the news and you’re terrified because you’re looking around and you’re saying, what’s going on? Maitland’s getting softer or Longwood’s getting softer or Altamont Springs is struggling.

My friend over there owns a house trying to get out of it. You have less to be concerned about. This data looks like what I see in the hottest markets in Miami in terms of how tight it is, how safe it is and obviously, luxury market, this has been the narrative too from a national level, is that the mid-range and the bottom of the market is already struggling for the past six months to a year. But the luxury end, where the money still lives, that this is not such a problem. The fascinating thing is, okay, fascinating thing, for whatever reason, even though everywhere else in the country, people have said, enough’s enough, I’m selling my house.

This market is locked down. So I would tell you, which is weird, because I don’t say this a lot, there is a supply side tightness in Winter Park, which is not representative of much of the rest of the market. But if you are in Winter Park now, and you’re looking for an expert to help you with your home sale, I’m a 20-year agent, nearly 4,500 sales sold and as far as the process is concerned, very rarely find someone that knows the data as well as I do, and able to do a phenomenal job to help.