Greetings from Orlando, housing in Florida
We're in Orlando for a family wedding and actually drove rather than fly, only 380 miles and a casual 8 hour drive. It's nice to see family for a joyous occasion and since we all live across the country, we don't get together often enough.
The biggest difference that I notice about the Charleston real estate market and the Florida housing market which has been battered by everything you've been hearing and reading about is the number of billboards advertising new home communities. On the drive down, every billboard on the side of the road advertised another new home community. When you drive down the freeways in the Charleston area, an occasional billboard might advertise a new home community while in Florida, it seems like every single one does.
Just outside of downtown Orlando, I noticed an unusual looking building in the distance, when we approached closer, it was a luxury condominium development that was abandoned. The signs of excess in the housing market can be best symbolized by builders and developers egos when they attempt to make ugly saleable.
A few of my cousins who live in Florida were concerned with how my real estate business was in Charleston, fearing how the problems in the Florida market might be the same for me in Charleston. Thankfully, I was able to assure them that while the Charleston South Carolina real estate market did have too much inventory and declining unit sales, prices were still holding fairly steady. And while Florida real estate sales have seemingly come to a total stop, at least buyers and sellers are still buying and selling Charleston homes for sale every day.