Number of Palm Beach listings is up, just in time to greet Thanksgiving house-hunters

If Halloween is the warm-up, then Thanksgiving is the traditional kickoff for the winter real estate season in Palm Beach.

And many of the folks in town to munch on some turkey this week may also find some home-shopping on their to-do list, with local real estate professionals saying they’re ready to help house-hunters find their own piece of paradise.

Real estate agents and brokers also are welcoming house-hunters with some good news, even if that news is relative: Although November almost always sees an uptick in listings, more properties are for sale right now in the multiple listing service than at this time of year for the past three years.

The caveat? The number of listings of premium, move-in ready properties — especially those on the ocean and the lakefront — remains frustratingly slim in the MLS, agents say. And overall, housing inventory remains far tighter than it was before the coronavirus pandemic began more than three years ago.

That’s meant the pros are working overtime putting together off-market deals — and sometimes sizable ones — to meet demand.

“Some people are still saying inventory is pretty tight, but it’s much, much better,” said Sotheby’s International Realty agent John Cregan.

He noted that agents who took listings off the market for the summer are beginning to return them to the MLS. And never-listed properties also have entered the picture, at solid prices that reflect the supply-and-demand realities of an evolving market where buyers still outnumber sellers.

Many sellers, agents say, are finally adjusting their price expectations in the aftermath of what has been described as a once-in-a-generation real estate boom that drove the market over the last few years in Palm Beach.

“We’ve been really busy since coming back from Labor Day,” Cregan said. “And we think it’s been a fairer market — buyers gave a little and sellers gave a little, and everybody got something.”

And the growing number of MLS listings is a plus for buyers, he added.

“People don’t like feeling that pressure of being told, ‘Here are three things. Pick one.’ They are a little more comfortable with increased options,” Cregan said.

Pandemic sparked a real estate rush in Palm Beach starting in 2020

The number of active MLS listings for single-family homes and townhouses on the island has climbed to around 78 in the Palm Beach Board of Realtors Multiple Listing Service, a search early this week showed.

To put that number in perspective, last year at this time there were about 50 of those listings, and at the same time in 2021 there were about 43. The recent MLS search also showed residential “land-acreage” listings numbered 19, although eight of those properties were also in the single-family home category as possible tear-downs.

The 2022 and 2021 numbers reflect the Wild West days of the real estate rush that decimated housing inventory on the island following the coronavirus pandemic’s arrival in the spring of 2020. That’s when buyers scooped up just about anything that had a front door —and drove prices up to never-before-seen levels that have yet to substantially recede.

Helping fuel the sales rush was Florida’s favorable tax picture compared to other states, a powerful draw for many buyers already looking to weather the health crisis in Palm Beach.

The effect of the stampede on housing inventory over the past three years has been dramatic. Consider that around Thanksgiving in 2020, the first year of the health crisis, there were 91 single-family and townhouse listings in the MLS. Compare that number to the same pre-pandemic period in 2019, when there were 151.

Number of condo, co-op listings is up town-wide in Palm Beach

It’s the same story for condominiums and co-operative units, a look at Thanksgiving-week MLS data shows. Right now, there are about 122 units for sale town-wide, including 75 apartments on the South End, where asking prices tend to be much lower than in Midtown and the near North End. In the latter two areas, there are 48 MLS listings for apartments.

During the same period last year, a total of 103 apartments were on the market — 31 in Midtown and 72 on the South End. Approaching Thanksgiving weekend in 2021, there were just 72 condos and co-ops on the market in total, compared to 224 during the holiday in 2020 — and nearly 300 in 2019, a few months before the coronavirus upended real estate on the island.

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Discussing the overall market, Corcoran Group agent Bill Yahn said more listings are likely on the way.

“A lot of (agents) hold their inventory until the (winter) season starts. So we’re starting to see new inventory on the market. And we’re seeing some of the properties that have been on the market for a while have started to be repriced” a little lower, Yahn said.

The need to reduce prices often reflects sellers who have only recently adjusted to the fact that prices have flattened in the wake of pandemic-driven forces that drove them to new highs, agents agreed. And the price differential isn’t necessarily dramatic, Yahn said, using as an example a house on the North End that might be reduced from asking $16 million to $14 million.

“There haven’t been many of those (price reductions), but there have been some,” he added.

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Palm Beach real estate agent: ‘The feeding frenzy is over’

In any event, prices have settled far above pre-pandemic levels, according to sales reports from agencies that do business on the island, even if they are no longer on a rapid rise. “The feeding frenzy is over,” Yahn said. “The prices are not going up — but they’ve leveled up.”

And that means that setting a price for a property to reflect the demands of today’s market is absolutely key to selling it, said Premier Estate Properties agent Margit Brandt. She noted how buyers’ demand for move-in ready houses — meaning new, newer or recently remodeled homes — remains strong, especially for properties on the water.

“From what we’ve seen from our listings, the market is very healthy,” Brandt said. “If a property is priced correctly and marketed correctly, it’s going to move.”

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Contributing to the market activity, Brandt added, are people who bought homes in Palm Beach during the sales frenzy of 2021 and 2022 and settled for a house, townhouse or condo that wasn’t exactly what they wanted. Now, many of those owners are looking to sell those properties and buy something that better suits their tastes and needs.

“I think a lot of buyers came to Palm Beach (during the past three years) and were just getting their feet wet,” Brandt added. “But they have (now) learned what they do and don’t like.”

That could mean finding a new home on a beach-access street in the North End, for example, or moving from the North End to Midtown, she said.

She also noted a new pool of potential buyers — people who weathered the pandemic elsewhere but have since become disenchanted with their quality of life in, say, New York City or Los Angeles. The charms of Palm Beach and the growing vibrancy of the business and cultural climate in adjacent West Palm Beach conceivably could mean a “second wave” of post-pandemic house-hunters, she said.

“Now is a very good time for sellers to be putting their homes on the market,” Brandt added.

Spate of new Palm Beach listings have surfaced over the past two months

The most recent sales and listing report prepared by the Rabideau Klein law firm in Palm Beach drilled deep into the increase in MLS listings.

In October, 20 single-family residences entered the MLS at prices starting at $3.4 million. But the vast majority of those listings — 13 in all — are asking above $12 million, the Rabideau Klein report showed. Two of those are lakefront properties that have prices topping $50 million, with 315 Chapel Hill Road in Midtown asking $59.5 million through broker Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate; and 200 Via Palma in the Estate Section priced at $57.85 million by broker Lawrence Moens of Lawrence A. Moens Associates.

The October listings represented a substantial increase in MLS-listed properties from the previous two months, according to other reports released by Rabideau Klein. In September there were 10 new single-family listings, compared to just two in August.

More recently, according to MLS searches, 18 single-family properties entered the market between Nov. 1 and the beginning of this week. The most expensive of those were four homes in the Estate Section:

• the lakefront home of “This Old House" star Bob Vila and his wife, Diana Barrett, at 690 Island Drive, listed at $52.9 million by agent Chris Vila of PB Realty Advisors;

• a lakefront house at 10 Via Vizcaya priced at $45 million, relisted by agent Heidi Wicky of Sotheby’s International Realty;

• fashion designers Tommy and Dee Hilfiger's lakeside estate at 313 Dunbar Road, relisted by Angle with a lower price of $35.9 million; and

• a recently renovated house at 120 Clarendon Ave. in the Estate Section, listed at $36.5 million by agents Dana Koch and Paulette Koch of the Corcoran Group.

It’s a sure bet those listings, the others in the MLS and some off-market properties will draw at least a few once-overs during the next few days. “A lot of people are in town for Thanksgiving. And there are a lot of people looking at real estate,” Brandt said. “There’s energy, there’s momentum in the market. It’s busy, for sure.”

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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: House-hunters in Palm Beach are finding more listings than in years