Data Analysis

Miami-Dade has three and a half condo sellers for every condo buyer, more than double the national gap

Redfin estimates buyers and sellers in each metro every month. Across five Florida metros the imbalance is almost entirely a condo problem.

Redfin counted 10,065 condo and co-op sellers in Miami-Dade in July against an estimated 2,888 buyers. That is 3.49 sellers for every buyer, a gap of 248.5%.

Nationally the condo gap was 111.5%. Miami-Dade's is more than double it.

Redfin publishes this as a monthly estimate for the 50 largest US metros. Five Florida metros carry current data, and every one of them is what Redfin classifies as a buyer's market, which it defines as sellers exceeding buyers by more than 10%.

The single-family column is the one to read first

Florida's houses are not unusual. Single-family gaps across these five metros run from 46% to 78%, against 43% nationally. Wider, and in the same range. West Palm Beach's single-family gap of 46.1% is barely above the national figure.

The condo column is where Florida separates. Every metro is above the national condo gap, and Miami and Orlando are more than double it. The spread between a metro's single-family gap and its condo gap is 171 points in Miami-Dade and 155 in Orlando. Nationally it is 68.

So the story people tell about Florida being oversupplied is, in this data, a story about one property type.

What the two lines actually are

This is the part most coverage of this chart leaves out, and it changes how much weight the gap can carry.

The two sides are not the same kind of number. Redfin counts sellers as active MLS listings, which is close to a census. It estimates buyers from its own proprietary data combined with MLS data, which is a model. A widening gap is therefore partly a statement about two different measurement methods, and the buyer line carries uncertainty the seller line does not.

We were able to check the seller side, and it holds. Redfin's own county file lists active listings for every Florida county monthly. Summed to the same metro footprints for May, it gives 18,636 for Orlando against Balance of Power's 18,704, and 24,776 for Tampa against 24,636. The seller line is what it says it is. No such check exists for the buyer line, and we are not aware of any second source that publishes one.

What this does not mean

A 3.49 to one ratio does not mean 3.49 condos are for sale for every person who wants one. It compares a stock to a flow: active listings accumulate month after month until they sell or expire, while the buyer estimate describes people in the market during that month. A slow-selling segment will show a widening gap even with steady demand, because unsold listings stay in the numerator.

It also does not describe any building or any unit.

Redfin's metro names are narrower than people assume. Its Miami metro is Miami-Dade County alone, not the three-county area Florida Realtors publishes as Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach. Its Tampa metro covers Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando.

Nothing here forecasts what happens next, and none of it values a specific property.

If you are in this market

Buying a condo in any of these five metros means the widest choice and the most negotiating room this dataset has recorded for Florida. Our own figures for the same month put condo sellers in Collier at 91.0% of original list price and in the Keys at 92.8%, which is the same story measured from the other side of the transaction.

Selling a condo means competing against a great deal of similar inventory. The number that matters more than this gap is what comparable units in your own building closed at in the last ninety days, because a metro ratio cannot tell you whether your building is the one clearing or the one sitting.

Buying or selling a house in these metros is a materially different position, closer to the national picture than the condo figures suggest.

Limitations

Every figure above is published by Redfin, not computed by us. We hold no independent estimate of buyer counts and know of no second source that publishes one, so the buyer side of every ratio rests on one company's model and cannot be checked. The seller side we did check, as described above.

Only the 50 largest US metros are published. Six Florida metros appear in the file, but Fort Lauderdale's data stops at December 2019 and the rows since are empty. It is the only one of the fifty US metros in that state, so Broward County is absent from this analysis entirely and no figure here describes it.

Redfin's metro history in this dataset begins in 2016. The national series begins in 2013, which is why the two charts cover different spans.

Florida's twelve other markets are not in this data at all, and nothing here should be read as describing them.

Sources and links

• Redfin, Balance of Power: Buyers and Sellers
• Data hubs: /data/miami/, /data/tampa/, /data/orlando/, /data/jacksonville/, /data/west-palm-beach/
• Tool: /tools/florida-rent-vs-buy-by-county.html

Disclosure: Jon Brooks is a co-founder of Momentum Realty, a Florida real estate brokerage that owns and funds Florida Housing Intelligence. Momentum has a financial interest in Florida real estate transactions, including in markets named here. See our editorial standards.