In the middle of the biggest glut of condominiums in more than 30 years, Miami developers keep on building.
The oversupply will force prices down as much as 30 percent, the worst decline since the 1970s, and help push Florida’s economy into recession as early as October, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Economy.com, who owns a home in Vero Beach, Florida.
“Florida is the epicenter for all the problems that exist in the housing industry,” said Lewis Goodkin, president of Goodkin Consulting Corp. and a property adviser in Miami for the past 30 years, who also foresees a recession. “The problems we have now are unprecedented and a lot of people will get burnt.”
Thirty-seven new high-rise condos and 20,000 new units are being built in Miami’s 1,040-acre downtown, where sales fell almost 50 percent in May, according to the Florida Association of Realtors. The new units will join the 22,924 existing condos in Miami-Dade County that were for sale in April, according to Jack McCabe, chief executive officer of McCabe Research & Consulting LLC in Deerfield Beach, Florida. That’s the most unsold units since McCabe began tracking sales in 2002.
“Have you been to Miami lately?” Florida Governor Charlie Crist said at a homebuilders’ conference last week in Orlando. “It’s like we have a new state bird: the building crane.”
Unfortunately, MOST of the coastal areas of Florida are undergoing this very same problem. Have you been to Panama City Beach lately? From the start of Front Beach Road (hy 98) to the end, you cannot even SEE the Gulf of Mexico. All you see are wall-to-wall condos with an occasional public access way surrounded by “no parking” signs (how are you supposed to use the access ways if you can’t park nearby? PCB has no mass transport system). It’s horrible. The only beach one can actually use is St. Andrews State Park.