Orlando’s housing market continues to cool. Both sales and listings fell in June.
A report the Orlando Regional Realtor Association released July 15 showed that sales in the metropolitan area dropped 1.2% from 2,551 to 2,513 between May and June. Pending sales fell 6.2%.
A common refrain in the housing market holds that buyers are waiting for mortgage interest rates to fall. June’s average interest rate was 6.7%, according to the report, down slightly from 6.8% in May.
Sophia Rogers of Lokation Real Estate in Orlando said that narrative is not reflecting the real story.
“It’s so frustrating,” Rogers said. “Buyers aren’t saying it’s rates. Buyers are saying it’s price. But the news and media keep saying it’s the rates.”
Most of the buyers Rogers works with get qualified for mortgages before they begin house hunting, she said. “They know what the rate is before they go searching.”
It’s when they see the homes that their mortgages can buy that they change their minds. “When those numbers translate to $1,000 a month more than they are paying [in rent], they pull back,” Rogers said.
The median home price in metropolitan Orlando was $398,000 in June, down from $399,994 in May, but up more than $8,000 year over year, according to Homes.com research.
Sellers are the ones waiting for rates to drop
Getting sellers to lower their asking prices is the bigger problem, Rogers said. “We can provide the data, we can show them … everything we have to prove to them it isn’t 2021,” a year when virtually any home on the market would receive multiple offers within the first days of being listed.
For sellers, not buyers, the problem is related to rates, Rogers said. She said owners who scored mortgages at or below 3% in the low-rate years after the pandemic are wary of not selling for enough to afford something in the new economy.
She said sellers want buyers to overpay for their houses to cover the higher interest rate on their new mortgage.
Rather than price down, sellers have been asking Rogers to market their properties for rent, too, a strategy she said has not really been more successful "because they price the rent too high,” she said.
Homes spent an average of 67 days on market in June, down from 68 days in May, but up from 54 days for the same period in 2024, according to the association’s report.
“Metrics like days on market … tell the story of how to win in this market,” Rogers said. “The sellers that are pricing right are selling their homes in three weeks, maybe a month.”
Inventory was virtually flat from May to June, with roughly 14,000 listings in both months, according to Homes.com data. It was up 28% from 11,184 homes on the market in June 2024, but a national wave of "delistings" — properties for sale being taken off the market — is digging into the inventory gains made since the pandemic. The National Association of Realtors reported in July that delistings rose 47% nationwide in May.
The one bright spot is that builders are reducing prices on new construction, Rogers said, "and that could put downward pressure on existing home listings. And that might be our golden ticket.”