How hard will Labor Day Weekend shoppers have to work to find real estate in Palm Beach?
Talk to real estate agents in Palm Beach — and we did just that this week through informal conversations — and they’ll tell you it’s been a pretty normal summer, thanks to slower sales and many potential buyers traveling out of town.
That’s a radical change from the last two summers, when the town’s agents and brokers were scrambling with sales, largely because many people remained in Palm Beach, thanks to the then-fierce volatility of the coronavirus pandemic and a related lack of interest in air travel.
But one thing isn’t much different this year. Anyone shopping for a single-family house, condominium and co-operative unit this Labor Day weekend will continue to find slim pickings.
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Housing inventory remains stretched as tight as a beach umbrella opened for the very first time. For that, frustrated shoppers can thank those buyers who closed deals during the first half of the year, leaving inventory a “historic lows,” as one seasoned agent put it.
Although the numbers can fluctuate daily, a look at the Palm Beach Board of Realtors Multiple Listing Service late this week revealed 36 single-family listings — at prices ranging from $4.15 million to $59 million — along with one townhouse asking $14.25 million.
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There are also 15 listings in the land category. Of those, seven properties are vacant, priced at between $5.5 million and $150 million. The other eight have tear-down houses on them.
Condo and co-op shoppers, meanwhile, will find 69 options, ranging in price from $359,000 to $19.5 million.
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Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call (561) 820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Labor Day real estate shoppers will have to work harder in Palm Beach
