
How the FLORIDA real estate craze has evolved
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The florida home-buying craze is alive and well in Florida, where people are selling homes for a premium.
Now, as home prices are climbing, some homeowners are getting more serious about selling their homes.
And some of the new sellers are taking a more aggressive approach to selling their properties, including the use of real estate agents to collect payments.
“We’re starting to see people selling more aggressively now than we did a year ago, but it’s still very early in the game,” said Scott Cote, a real estate agent with The Cote Group.
Cote has been selling properties for nearly a decade, starting out with just a handful of properties in the Palm Beach area.
He recently sold three homes in the Lake Worth neighborhood for $1.3 million.
“I’m selling for more than the cost of the house.
I don’t even want to think about it,” he said.
Cothe is one of several Florida real estate brokers taking a proactive approach to helping people sell their homes, which has helped the number of properties sold in the state jump from 1,100 in October to 2,800 last week.
“The Florida real-estate market is on the upswing, but we need to be smart about it and be aware of it,” said Brian Fazio, a home-sales agent at the Fazios of Palm Beach, a small home-builder that specializes in selling homes to first-time buyers.
In his home-selling videos, Cote talks about the many benefits of buying a home.
He said the number one thing that drives people to buy homes is affordability.
“That’s why we have so many people moving here,” he says.
In Florida, a house can be worth $400,000, with a buyer paying $500,000 for the home.
Many home-buyers don’t want to pay more for a home they don’t need.
The new trend of selling homes at a discount is taking off, especially in places like Jacksonville, which was once known for being a hotbed of home-sale activity.
In October, Jacksonville sold 782 homes for $3.5 million, and that was a 30 percent increase over October last year.
But with the housing crash that began in late 2008, there is a noticeable drop in home-price activity.
That has sparked a bidding war among buyers.
Many sellers are selling their houses because they feel the value is too high, but they don�t want to take on too much risk with the property.
“They’re buying for the value of the property and they donít want anyone else to have a property, so they’re doing it for the most part with their own money,” Cote said.
“A lot of them have never been to a real-world sale,” he added.
Cue said his clients don’t just want to buy a house for their home, but for a family.
“They want to get rid of the mortgage and they want to have the kids get a good education,” he explained.
Cotes sales team also helps prospective buyers find a home that they can afford.
If they’re going to buy, they want the home to be a nice house with lots of natural light, big windows and lots of features.
In addition to helping buyers navigate the real estate market, Cotes real-tor team also gets to know potential home sellers. “If they�re selling on a property and their home is in the middle of the market, we help them identify what they�ve got,” he noted.
Some buyers aren’t just looking to buy for themselves, but also to keep their home neat and tidy.
“A lot more are looking for a place that�s going to keep it that way and they need to get it to that level of quality,” Cotes said.
While the state is seeing a lot of buyers and sellers buying and selling, Cothe said there are still a lot more people who are looking to sell their properties.
“There are a lot less homes being sold, but the number is rising,” he continued.
The National Association of Realtors, a national real estate industry group, estimates there are more than 6 million homeowners who are trying to sell homes, and many of those are not even trying to buy their own homes.
The association also noted that while the national housing crash has caused a drop in homes being bought and sold, there are thousands of people in the United States who are taking out loans to buy.
That can be a big obstacle to selling a home, and there are some factors that can affect the quality of the home a buyer can afford to buy and sell.
The mortgage interest rate on a home can be the biggest barrier.
Another factor that can have an impact on whether someone can afford a home is whether they are a first-timer or have been in the real-tourism industry.