You’ll find that in Miami, but even Miami has a massive fall off in cash buying this year. That has become an interesting part of this narrative because in a face of a marketplace with high interest rates, the cash buyers have been 30, 40% of the market some months, and they’re able to absorb and help keep the inventory moving. Even when the borrowing public is a bit frozen.

And we have an interesting narrative playing out because you’ll know everybody was planning for Jerome Powell and the pivot and the central bank to cut rates in his middle of September. We also remember that in the 45 days leading up to that cut in August, the 30 year mortgage rate already started to discount itself knowing that that upcoming rate cut was coming. In fact, I’m going to show you the chart right here.

This is August running down. It bottoms in September and it hangs out at six and a quarter for a minute. And then it spikes straight back up.

In fact, this is a move literally by October 2nd, right here, 6.26, where we are today. And the interest rate is nearly 1% higher for a buyer than 30 days ago. You see a lot of news about this being covered where it’s saying in the past 30 days, buyers have lost around $33,000 of buying power, whatever depends on the price range they’re in.

Some buyers are getting a massive cut in the pre-approval. So they went to the lender a month ago. And now all of a sudden, Hey, your interest rate is half a percent higher, three quarters of a percent higher.

You’re now shopping a hundred grand less. So ultimately the buying pool shrinks and that’s not good because look at what’s happening right now. 23% less buyers.

Now you have to understand, look at how much time the marketplace spends million plus around the 40% mark cash sales. Okay. So a lot of time is either above or below this line right here.

Okay. Depending on the time of year we are and all that kind of stuff. It got really volatile right here.

Went really low, really high coming into 2024, but then it’s sailed downward. So right now we’re just above 30%. We’re kind of running a trend there over the last 90 days.

And you might think, Hey, that’s not a big deal. We’ll understand the past couple of years, there’s been months where we’re close to 50%, particularly in this category. And I think this has a lot to do, obviously, when you’re talking in this price category with where money is coming from.

So a lot of Florida is fed on higher priced marketplaces. People sell their real estate somewhere else. They move it here for whatever reason.

This tells me that there is a challenge getting the equity from another market into this one. We are having the same narrative nationwide where other marketplaces around the country themselves are seeing the same issues where home sellers themselves are competing with more and more inventory around them. So it could be the delay and challenges that home buyers themselves are having just by selling an asset in Massachusetts or New York city or Connecticut for wherever they’re coming from.

This is the dollar volumes. This is shows the entire index of million plus homes, how much is being sold in total sales. Okay.

This is important because obviously it shows no different than watching GDP. This is important to see the health of the market. And I will tell you, this is starkly different than the rest of the market segments in Orlando, where every single month in the million plus category this year, except for February, February was down 11.3% against prior year, but all the other months are up usually double digits, 16% over last year, 17%, 16%, 10%, 13%.

So you have a consistent running improvement in sales against prior year, which again, if I take you in a different marketplace and I pull all market segments up together, I would say very few of them, you will find six, seven months straight where they’re actually not seeing a fall off. I’m noticing in places like winter garden has a decent and growing size of the luxury market. They have been running negative for three out of the past four months in dollar volume.

This is interesting to me. You’re having a lot of that slide happening across the market as prices in some of these market segments are actually rolling a little bit backwards in order to get these homes sold. And in some cases you’re just not seeing enough homes to turn over to compete with prior year.