I hope everyone is doing well and is looking forward to some time at the beach. We are settled in to our new office and have a full time office manager for the first time. This is a huge help to me and we are already seeing benefits in organization and efficiency. I hope to have more time to focus on my sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly, and sometimes annual newsletter. I want this to once again be something you can count on to see each month.
My goal is to provide you with information on what's selling, how values are trending, updates on factors affecting the market, and events going on in the area. I'll also highlight what I think are the best deals on the market. For those of you interested in the market from Mexico Beach to WindMark, I'm regularly updating The Top 25 Houses and Top 15 lots on
www.mexicobeachsales.com. If you're on Facebook and want to follow us, the
98 Real Estate Group Page usually has 3-4 updates a week including hot new listings.
The market is plugging along and has done fine for what is usually our slowest time of the year. It's slower every year until people start thinking about and visiting the beach in the Spring. Many of the buyers that have been looking for months or years get more serious in later February because they want a place to enjoy for the season and they know the best deals will start selling much more quickly when more people are here. The number of properties on the market has slightly increased from 614 on 1/15/14 to 623 properties on 2/15/14. Overall I'd still say the inventory is going down. It went up a little due to a number of interior lots being listed along with a number of listings that expired at the end of the year being renewed.
Here are my favorite deals for the Port St. Joe listings:
There are still plenty of active buyers out there right now for homes priced near their likely appraisal values. I'm working on another mailout that we will be sending out again to all of the property owners this month. We are working hard to get new listings and I'd love to talk to anyone that wants to sell. I'm proud to say that 98 Real Estate Group has listed 72 homes from Mexico Beach to Cape San Blas since 2013. We have successfully sold 56 of these as of 1/31/14. Counting vacant lots and commercial properties, we've sold 126 properties since the start of 2013.
We've
not had the problems our friends to the North have faced this winter, but
we have not been immune to the cold weather. It's certainly been the
longest and most drawn out cold winter I remember in my 10 years living
here. I've heard locals say there hasn't been anything like the freeze we
saw a few weeks ago since 1989. Here are a few pictures from our
"freeze".
