JBREC: The Northeast housing market is hot, Florida's housing market is softening

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On Thursday, researchers at John Burns Research and Consulting (JBREC) publicly released the results from their March survey of real estate agents.

The survey paints a similar picture to what inventory data has been telling us for months: There’s some softening occurring in pockets of Florida and Texas, where active listings are close to pre-pandemic levels, while there’s still a great deal of competitiveness in tight inventory markets in the Northeast, Midwest, and Southern California.

According to the survey, 94% of resale agents in the Northeast said buyers outnumber sellers in their market. While just 30% of resale agents in Southern Florida said buyers outnumber sellers in their market.

In most markets, home buyers still outnumber home sellers.

What’s going on in Florida and Texas?

Housing inventory levels in Florida are up the most in the nation on a year-over-year basis (57%), but the bulk of the increase is really concentrated in sections of Southwest Florida. In particular, in markets like Cape Coral and Fort Myers, which were hard-hit by Hurricane Ian in September 2022. Hurricane Ian left behind thousands of damaged homes, and the subsequent need for renovations has resulted in a jump of available housing inventory. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Hurricane Ian caused an estimated $112.9 billion worth of total damage, making Ian the third-costliest U.S. hurricane on record. In addition to residential property damage, the hurricane coincided with spiked home insurance costs. This combination of increased housing supply for sale—the damaged homes, combined with strained demand, the resulting spiked home prices, spiked mortgage rates, higher insurance premiums, and higher HOAs—has translated into market softening across much of Southwest Florida.

In some pockets of Texas, particularly in Austin, home prices simply rose too far, too fast. Once the pandemic-era migration boom fizzled out, Austin home prices were simply too far beyond what locals could afford, so prices fell there.

KKR to acquire $1.6 Billion student housing portfolio from Blackstone

On Thursday, a joint press release announced that KKR will acquire a portfolio of 19 student housing properties, comprising a 10,000 "bed" portfolio, for $1.64 billion from Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, the nation’s largest owner of student housing.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter.

In total, Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust owns 190 student housing properties, including 140,000 "beds,” primarily through American Campus Communities (ACC), which it acquired in 2022.

Once the deal is complete, these 19 student housing properties will be managed by University Partners, KKR’s student housing operator, which was launched in 2016. This deal takes University Partners’ student housing portfolio to a total of 25,000 "beds."

This weekend, ResiClub PRO members will receive a deep dive examining the number of home sales "lost" by housing market due to the "lock-in effect."