The Houston housing market showed encouraging signs of balance in January including expanded inventory and steady buyer demand, according to the latest monthly Housing Report from the Houston Association of REALTORS®.
Active listings increased 15.7% year over year, with 54,589 properties on the market during the month. Closings fell 1% year over year, with 4,999 homes sold — the fewest transactions since January 2023.
However, pending sales increased 8.5%, with 6,813 listings going under contract, indicating strong sales in the coming weeks.
Days on market increased to 66, up five days from a year prior. That was the highest average since February 2020, when homes spent an average of 68 days on the market.
Prices fluctuated, with the median decreasing 0.9% to $233,045 and the average increasing 2.8% to $416,722. Luxury home sales — those with a price tag of $1 million or more — increased 15.5% year over year.
“Right now, buyers have more choices and a bit more time to make decisions, while sellers are adjusting to a market that’s becoming balanced,” said HAR Chair Theresa Hill. “With rates expected to ease a little this year, buyers who have been waiting on the sidelines may start to feel more confident and enter the market. That should help maintain demand and create additional opportunities for sellers throughout the year.”
Given the rate of sales, Houston had a 4.7-month inventory, up from 4.2 months a year prior.
Decreased mortgage rates and median prices meant improved affordability for homebuyers last month. Assuming a 20% down payment, the typical Houston homebuyer in January needed to spend $1,561.26 per month, down from $1,722.81 in January 2025. That amounts to about $2,000 less annually.
January was the 15th of the last 18 months with improved housing affordability.
Looking only at existing-home sales, closings decreased by just 10 sales annually, with 3,422 homes sold in January. The average sales price increased 3.8% to $428,152, while the median was steady at $320,000.
Among for-sale townhomes and condominiums, sales dropped 25.9% last month, with 269 units sold. The average price decreased 8.6% to $226,343, while the median fell 11.9% to $185,000. That was the lowest level since February 2021.
Townhome and condo inventory hit a 7.6-month supply, up from 5.5 months in January 2025.
Leases of single-family rentals leapt 9.4% year over year in December, with 3,283 leases signed. At the same time, new listings jumped 21.2% year over year with 5,486 SFRs added to the MLS, providing a plethora of single-family options for Houston renters. Amid increased inventory, the typical SFR stayed on the market for 48 days, up one week from December 2024.
For the full year, renters signed 47,292 leases, up 6.2% from 2024. The total dollar value increased 6.9% to over $110 million.
Lease prices were relatively flat throughout the year, with the average declining 0.8% year over year to $2,245 in December. That was nearly $20 cheaper than December 2024 and marked the sixth-straight month of statistically unchanged prices.
“A growing supply of rental properties gave renters more flexibility in 2025, while steady demand kept leasing activity moving at a healthy pace without putting upward pressure on prices,” said HAR Chair Theresa Hill. “Even as interest rates ease, rental demand is expected to remain strong this year.”
For townhome and condominium rentals, leasing activity in 2025 stuttered compared to 2024 but increased annually in December. Houston renters signed leases for 7,171 condos and townhomes in 2025, down 3.9% year over year, but leased 518 in December, up 11.2% from December 2024. Days on market increased from 49 days to 51 days.
Coloradans looking to buy homes or simply hold onto their property face a barrage of challenges: a white-hot real estate market, high interest rates and soaring property taxes. You can add surging home insurance rates to the pile of problems eroding the landscape of affordable housing options.
Colorado homeowners are reporting premium increases ranging from roughly 30% to more than 130% in just the past few years. People are getting the bad news that their policies won’t be renewed. Some insurance companies are deciding not to write new policies to cut their risks.
And condo owners are getting hit with special assessments and higher dues because premiums are skyrocketing for homeowners associations. The groups must often resort to non-standard carriers, which typically charge sky-high rates for lesser coverage.
“We truly have the hardest market that we’ve seen in a generation for property insurance,” said Carole Walker, executive director of the trade organization Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.
Colorado’s not alone. Inflation, higher home costs and the rising number and severity of natural disasters and wildfires are pushing up insurance costs. The average premium rate increase nationwide in 2023 was 11.3%, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
But Colorado’s recent increases stand out. The state was one of three with the biggest cumulative change in rates 2018-2023. Colorado logged a 57.9% jump, just behind Texas at 59.9%. Arizona saw a 52.9% increase.
A convergence of factors is driving the run-up in costs, Walker said. Higher inflation is one of those. “You have everything that insurance pays for going up in cost.”
Building materials are more expensive. Labor costs are up and labor shortages create delays and add to the expense. Walker said insurance-related lawsuits also help push up premiums.
An even larger force is the fallout from increasingly costly wildfires, hail storms and other disasters. Insurance companies doing business in Colorado reported the fourth-highest losses in the country for five years, according to data compiled for a 2023 report by the Colorado Division of Insurance.
“I hate to say it, but we all likely need to adjust to higher premiums over the long term,” Walker said.
The effects of the mounting risks are being felt by a lesser known, but crucial link in the chain that connects to homeowners: the reinsurance market. Reinsurers are typically large, global companies that provide insurance to insurance companies to help spread the risk.
“The international impact of climate change, of increasing climate disasters, the severity of those disasters is causing reinsurers to consider their risk, reduce their exposure or increase their premiums,” said Vince Plymell, spokesman for the insurance division.
As a result, the effects of hurricanes and earthquakes in other parts of the country or world can eventually show up in a Colorado homeowner’s insurance bill, said Jason Lapham, the state’s deputy commissioner for property and casualty insurance.
Closer to home are the growing risks of wildfire and hail storms. Colorado is second in the nation for hail-damage claims and second only to California for the number of homes at risk from wildfires. Colorado hasn’t seen the kind of wide scale refusal of companies to write new policies that California has, but Lapham said there is a trend of some companies not re-upping policies in areas prone to wildfires or other disasters or taking “a pause” on new clients.
“It doesn’t mean they’re leaving the state entirely, but for those people who are affected, the effect is the same,” Lapham said.
State officials don’t have a lot of insight into the modeling used by companies to decide which areas are too risky to insure, Lapham said. “We’re focused on getting a better understanding and creating transparency, not just for us but also for policy holders.”
Levi Ware, project manager from Red Hawk Roofing company from Denver, takes pictures of a roof damaged by large hail and a tornado along Chesapeake Street in Highlands Ranch on June 23, 2023. A rare tornado hit the Highlands Ranch area Thursday afternoon causing damage to roofs and uprooting large trees. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
What’s worse than rising premiums?
There were plenty of insurance options for Bryan Watts and his wife when they bought a house in Guffey in Park County, west of Cripple Creek. The premium was about $2,000 in 2019 and rose gradually to $2,522 for the 2023-2024 policy year.
“Things changed dramatically in August 2023 when we received a notice of non-renewal at the policy maturity of June 2024,” Watts said. “I called them and was told it was simply due to wildfire risk.”
Watts tried to reason with the company, saying he had done a lot of work to reduce threats from wildfire. He offered to send pictures of his home or show an inspector around his property. But the insurer told him that it wasn’t going to cover homes in his zip code.
“I thought, ‘Well, no big deal. I’ll just move to another carrier,’” Watts said. “I had no idea how bad it had gotten just in the last year or two.”
A broker Watts worked with found only nonstandard insurers willing to cover his home. The insurers might take on customers that more traditional companies consider too risky, but the coverage comes at a high price. In Watts’ case, the quote was for nearly $35,000.
After making calls on his own, Watts found one of the big-name companies willing to write a policy for $4,800. A hang-up for companies that turned him down was that the nearest fire station is about 16 miles from his home. “They’re looking for substations that are 10 miles or closer,” Watts said.
Like a lot of people, Watts has a mortgage on his house, which means he needs to carry insurance. “There are going to be very few people who are able to live out here without a mortgage,” he said.
Escalating home insurance premiums and companies scaling back coverage are creating angst in the real estate industry. Brian Tanner, vice president of public policy for the Colorado Association of Realtors, said agents are seeing properties lose coverage or unable to find insurance.
“All of this together is incredibly problematic for a market that we already know is strained. We need more available units,” Tanner said. “If we have existing residences that cannot secure insurance, that is absolutely a market disruptor.”
Real estate agents are scrambling to help clients to find coverage, Tanner said. He is concerned about rising rates on people on fixed incomes.
The state is creating an insurer of last resort, officially called the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, which will be paid for by assessments on the insurance industry. But it won’t be up and running until 2025 and applicants must have been turned down by at least three carriers.
Walker said the goal is to relieve pressure on the standard carriers by shifting some of the high risks, which the industry hopes will stabilize the market.
“Everybody I talk to is talking about the property insurance issue,” said Sarah Thorsteinson, CEO of the Altitude Realtors association, which includes Summit and Routt counties.
Real estate agents working in mountain communities started looking at the effect of wildfire risks on home insurance rates around 2012. That’s when the association started education and fire-mitigation programs for members and the public to head off possible mandates it worried could increase costs for buyers and sellers.
Thorsteinson represents property owners as a non-voting member of the Colorado Fire Commission. She said the association’s biggest concern with rising insurance premiums is housing affordability.
The ongoing struggle by homeowners associations, HOAs, to secure insurance has grown tougher, Thorsteinson said. She has heard of HOA dues doubling and tripling for condo owners in her area after insurance premiums shot up.
“We’ve seen increases of 100% or more for HOA policies,” said Lapham with the state insurance division.
Even before the recent rate increases, it was common for HOAs to have to seek providers in the non-standard market, also called the surplus lines market. “My guess is that it’s more common now than it has been simply because of the tightening of the market generally,” Lapham said.
Many of the more well-known insurers have gotten out of the condo business, Walker said, leaving the nonstandard carriers, whose policies are more expensive and have higher deductibles.
The more traditional insurers exited in part because of fears around construction-related lawsuits by HOAs. A 2017 law that requires a majority of homeowners to approve pursuing a lawsuit rather than just the HOA board has done little to coax insurers to write policies for condo buildings.
In some cases, HOA boards, trying to avoid raising dues, have put off infrastructure improvements and maintenance, making insurers nervous about the liabilities, Walker said.
The Hiland Hills Townhomes HOA was able to line up a new insurer in 2023, but had to budget for a 30% increase in premiums. Dues went up from $336 a month to $460 per unit.
“The coverage decreased overall. This year we’re budgeting for another 15% increase,” said Dmitry Gall, the HOA board president at the Denver complex.
The HOA was able to shuffle some items in the policy to hold down the increase. Gall said the association is cutting back in other areas to help pay the premium.
The HOA where Jon Christianson has a rental unit saw its insurance premium leap from the $167,000 budgeted last year to nearly $607,000. His fees doubled, “with a special assessment coming,” he said.
A letter from the HOA board that Christianson shared with The Denver Post said the previous insurance carrier got out of the Colorado market. Several companies declined to offer bids on a new policy because of the height and age of the three buildings in the complex and the fire suppression system.
Then the insurance for Christianson’s primary residence rose by 40%.
“I’ve never filed a claim. I’ve been with same insurance company for five years,” Christianson said. “This is becoming unsustainable.”
Carole Walker, the Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Association, stands for a photo outside the residential building where she lives in Denver on May 7, 2024. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
A marathon, not a sprint
The Marshall fire, which killed two people and destroyed 1,084 homes and businesses, receives a lot of the blame for Colorado’s escalating home insurance rates. The Dec. 30, 2021, wildfire raged through Louisville, Superior and parts of unincorporated Boulder County, leaving more than $2 billion in property damage in its wake.
Walker said although the Marshall fire was a devastating event, the reasons for rising rates are more complex. For instance, more people are moving into areas along the Front Range that frequently get battered by hail. Walker said Colorado’s most expensive hail storm hit in May 2017, wreaking $2.7 billion in damage in today’s dollars.
But for Alan McDaniel, who has an insurance agency in Castle Rock, the threat of wildfire is the primary obstacle when looking for ways to get a handle on rising insurance costs.
“I’m lucky enough that the carrier I mostly use, Farmers Insurance, isn’t not renewing policies, but others are,” McDaniel said.
He has worked with homeowners around Larkspur and other areas deemed too risky for wildfires by some insurers. “You have to fill out a fire-mitigation plan, take pictures and prove to my underwriter that it’s worth taking on because they’ve done all the steps they need to do,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel and other insurance agents have met with fire agencies to learn more about reducing wildfire risks and programs like Firewise, a national program overseen by the state forest service in Colorado. A goal is to lower homeowners’ premiums by making changes.
“In light of the Marshall fire, we did get inquiries from some homeowners and associations that were facing increased premiums as well as potentially losing coverage,” said Bart Chambers, the fire marshal for the Castle Rock Fire and Rescue Department.
Chambers has met with insurance agents to help them understand the steps needed to better protect homes and businesses. The fire department collaborates with town planners on decreasing wildfire threats and hopes to increase the number of certified Firewise neighborhoods in Castle Rock.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” Chambers said. “It needs to be maintained and followed through continuously.”
Chambers spent 30 years with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
“We saw that on the front end there and we’re seeing it nationally now 20 years later, not only with wildfires but also with natural disasters,” Chambers said. “In Colorado, we can look at other people’s losses and make it better locally.”
Today’s rising developments were born from yesterday’s plans, policies and investments.
“It takes some years to get from visioning to implementation to developers getting all of their funding stacks together,” explained Deirdre Oss, who oversees large development reviews with Community Planning and Development, the city’s planning department.
Investors and developers were bullish on Denver’s growth during most of Mayor Michael Hancock’s first two terms. But some developers’ optimism has since dried up.
In just under two years, starting under Hancock’s last term and leading into current Mayor Mike Johnston’s first term, developers have submitted fewer plans for new multi-family residential buildings in Denver.
Some in the real estate industry caution that fewer proposals means that in five to ten years, there may no longer be massive cranes scattered across the skyline. Denver could see far fewer apartments and condos under construction. With fewer homes being built, home prices and rent would likely surge again.
How radical has the drop in new proposals been?
“In the City and County of Denver, there are currently 18,700 units under construction,” Scott Rathbun, head of Apartment Appraisers and Consultants, said. “They’ve broken ground. And once you break ground on a deal, you’re gonna finish the deal.”
Most of those units will be delivered by 2027.
“We’re gonna see a lot of cranes in the skyline in the City and County of Denver for the next three years,” he said.
Another 29,000 market-rate units and 2,900 subsidized units are going through the permitting pipeline, according to Rathbun.
All but 6,000 of those were proposed before the Expanding Housing Affordability rules went into effect on June 30, 2022. Those policies require that developers build more affordable housing every time they create a market-rate multifamily property. After they were in place, new proposals for market-rate housing plummeted in the city.
A construction crane over development in Sun Valley. May 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
“We’ve had some macroeconomic impacts that have made it more difficult to develop apartments, to make deals pencil, to make deals feasible,” Rathbun said. “But the same story, the same significant difference between the pre-June 30, 2022 and the post-June 30, 2022, does not exist in any of the other six counties in the metro area.”
Some suburbs, he explained, have larger development pipelines from June 30, 2022, to now than they did before.
The one big difference between Denver and those counties was the passing of the Expanding Housing Affordability rules — a law intended to create more housing stock where people could actually afford to live.
But if the law slows down the creation of housing, it could backfire, suggests Rathbun.
“When we see the reduction of cranes in the next five years, we’re also going to start to see rents skyrocket,” Rathbun said.
Why have proposals slowed down?
Demand for commercial real estate tanked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, interest rates have risen mightily. So have construction costs.
Companies building in the city have also been signaling they might move to places with fewer taxes and regulations.
Andrew Feinstein, one of the most active local developers in RiNo, says new development won’t happen if things don’t change.
“Cranes will become an extinct species if interest rates stay high, costs stay high, carrying costs stay high… and the regulatory environment remains challenging,” he wrote to Denverite.
Carrying costs include high property taxes and expensive insurance. The regulatory environment includes zoning restrictions, the time it takes the planning department to issue permits, and the Expanding Housing Affordability rules.
Apartments in North Capitol Hill. May 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Drew Hamrick, the Senior Vice President of Government Affairs for the Apartment Association of Metro Denver, believes high interest rates and overregulation of market-rate developments will also make investors wary of funding local projects.
“If interest rates were to drop significantly, projects that don’t currently make sense become more attractive,” he said.
Developers are dependent on institutional investors to fund their properties, and for years, Colorado has been “a fairly attractive place to do that based on the demand for housing and the environment for building,” Hamrick said. “That environment is getting significantly worse.”
Policies like Expanding Housing Affordability, make it too expensive to develop market-rate housing, he said. To him, that explains the slowdown in new development proposals Community Planning and Development has seen since the policy began on June 30, 2023.
“The fact that nobody’s applying for permits in Denver is a pretty good indication that in three years, the cranes that you’re seeing today are going to be gone,” Hamrick said. “But that’s not very indicative of what’s going to happen in five years or 10 years because ultimately, the price of market-rate rental housing goes up when there’s not enough of it.”
Despite skepticism from the private sector, city planners say the day of the crane is far from over.
Oss, of Community Planning and Development, is optimistic that more development is coming. Even as the big projects underway wrap up, new transformative projects are already in the works. She doesn’t see that changing over the next decade.
In part, this is because many massive projects could take a decade or more to complete, and these are slated to bring thousands of units of new housing to the city.
Massive central Denver mixed-use projects like the River Mile, the Ball Arena parking lot redevelopment and Burnham Yards will effectively expand the reach of Downtown Denver, more than doubling the city center in size.
Downtown Denver on a sunny day. May 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Despite high interest rates and construction costs, there’s no sign that those projects are dead, though their rollout will be affected by sweeping economic conditions.
Cherry Creek West, Fox Park at the site of the old Denver Post printing press building, Denargo Market, and the expansion of the former site of the Gates Rubber Plant are also in the works
And Northeast Denver is also likely to experience an ongoing boom in construction.
Mayor Mike Johnston has committed to speeding up permitting times by 30% by the end of 2024. The hope: Make development easier and keep those cranes rising.
“I think it’s probably going to be a pretty consistent part of our skyline,” Oss said. “I think the locations where those pop up will change.”
A rendering of the Upton, a condo building under construction at the old Shelby’s Bar & Grill site.
Courtesy of Amacon
Construction is underway at the old Shelby’s Bar and Grill site, at 18th and Glenarm streets, where Canadian developer Amacon is building a two-tower building with 461 for-sale units.
The homes, a mix of studios, one-, two- and three-bedrooms, start in the low-$400,000s, well below the median price of a home in the metro. But there will also be penthouses for those who can afford them.
The building will rise 400 feet tall.
A rendering of the Upton Residencies tower at the old Shelby’s Bar & Grill site. Courtesy of Amacon
“While downtown Denver has no shortage of rental units, Upton Residences is opening up new doors for homeownership in the heart of the city,” said Stephanie Babineau, VP of marketing and sales for Amacon, in a statement. “Upton will transform the Upper Downtown neighborhood into a vibrant hub, bridging Downtown Denver and the Uptown neighborhood. With the unique mix of residences, retail, and hotel-styled amenities spaces, we believe the development will bring new energy to the area and enrich the neighborhood.”
Units in the towers will start in the low $400,000s. There will be a mix of typical apartments and penthouses with floor-to-cieling windows offering a mix of city and mountain views.
“Upton will be a game-changing landmark that will redefine the Denver skyline,” said Steve Featherston, Vice President of Development and Construction at Amacon, in a statement. “It will stand as a tribute to the city and set a new standard for luxury living. This visual focal point is spotlighting how to effectively bring together residential, retail, and hospitality, for residents and the community to enjoy.”
The building broke ground in spring of 2022, and it’s slated to open in mid-2025.
Longtime Denverites will be stunned to see the towers rise where Shelby’s dished out drinks and food to neighbors.
The former manager of a homeowners association in Florida had her hand in the cookie jar, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s office.
Stephanie Lopez, who managed a 400-unit condo community in Dunedin, was arrested Feb. 7 and charged with one count of scheme to defraud and one count of grand theft, according to a news release. She’s accused of stealing a little less than $25,000.
Lopez, 56, managed the Mediterranean Manor, in the Tampa suburb, on behalf of her employer, Harbeck Hospitality. Detectives started investigating her last May, after Harbeck notified the sheriff’s department that Lopez was embezzling from the HOA.
She’s accused of spending the money on expenses like paying her mortgage and bills, buying windows for her home in Oldsmar and Amazon purchases.
Those alleged crimes are small potatoes compared to a massive HOA fraud that has come to light in South Florida.
The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office arrested five people in November 2022, accusing them of fleecing the Hammocks Community Association out of about $2 million.
Members of that HOA, the largest in South Florida, said they were “constantly harassed” for cash, with HOA board members requesting “1,000 for this, another $1,000 for that,” said former resident Lourdes Padron. When she and her spouse received an HOA bill for over $4,000, they moved rather than pay it.
Hammocks residents who complained of opaque finances allegedly were met with more harassment. When resident Manny Coburn signed a petition to recall the board, the former HOA board members retaliated by prohibiting him from community amenities, he said.
Fraud and mishandling of funds runs rampant among South Florida HOAs, according to the hundreds of written complaints lodged against them last year.
The state of Florida doesn’t watchdog HOAs. State law requires annual audits, but those audits don’t have to be submitted anywhere unless records requests are made. Residents who have disputes can opt to sue HOAs at their own expense but otherwise have few sources of recourse.
The Florida legislature took up a bill aimed at tightening regulations last year, in light of the Hammocks scandal, but the law that passed lacked bite.
“Someone else needs to be the gatekeeper who provides sound judgment to protect an association from running amok,” real estate attorney Josh Migdal told The Real Deal last year.
An “inherent conflict” exists for attorneys and property managers representing residential associations.
The boards at homeowners and condo associations across the state hire professional services firms to represent entire communities. But some owners and residents feel that the lawyers and property management firms cross the line and instead serve individual board members’ interests, Lidia Dinkova reports in The Real Deal’s latest issue.
Because many of those contracts provide for a flat fee with extra charges depending on the services, attorneys and property managers benefit from being asked to send threatening letters or by filing lawsuits against unit and homeowners. “The more services rendered, the more fees involved,” attorney William Sklar said.
I think anyone living in South Florida has heard of situations or lived in communities where this happens — whether it is based on warranted behavior (breaking association rules) or not. Think about that HOA board member who’s obsessed with tracking visitor parking, illegally towing cars or issuing fines for allegedly leaving your trash can out too long, failing to mow the lawn on time, etc. Beyond those smaller issues, though, are situations like one where an association’s attorney filed a lawsuit on behalf of a former board member against a resident who raised the alarm about potential board misspending.
Lawsuits over the massive fraud at the Hammocks, one of the largest associations in the state, also took aim at ex-HOA attorneys.
“The management company and the attorneys are afraid that they are going to get fired should they not completely have the backs of the board members, even if they are engaging in wrongdoing,” said attorney Eric Glazer.
A lack of state oversight has contributed to the problem.
“The statute itself creates a lot of incentives for attorneys and associations to work together against residents,” attorney James Bishop said.
What we’re thinking about: Will Malaysian firm Pacific & Orient sell its partially completed condo tower in North Bay Village to another developer active in the area, like Andy Ansin, Harry Macklowe or Jorge Pérez? Send me a note at kk@therealdeal.com.
CLOSING TIME
Residential: Alex Pirez’s Mocca Acquisitions LLC sold the 13,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion at 4940 Hammock Lake Drive in Coral Gables for a non-waterfront area record of $21 million. The buyer is a land trust.
Commercial: New York University paid $33 million for a medical office development site in downtown West Palm Beach, where it plans to move its Langone Health to the property at 324 Datura Street. Morning Calm Management sold the 0.6-acre site.
— Research by Adam Farence
NEW TO THE MARKET
1040 South Ocean Boulevard (Studio 910)
An ocean-to-Intracoastal compound in Manalapan hit the market for $79 million, about four years after it was asking less than half that amount ($35 million). The 2-acre estate, at 1040 South Ocean Boulevard, includes 200 feet of oceanfront, and a dock and boat lift on the Intracoastal Waterway. Maura Ann Christu with Island Realty PB has the listing.
A thing we’ve learned
Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin opposes casinos. In a letter to the editor published in the Miami Herald last week, Griffin wrote that “measurable research proves” that casinos lead to gambling addiction, higher crime rates and drops in property values. Developer Jeffrey Soffer has long pursued legislation that would allow him to run a casino at the Fontainebleau resort in Miami Beach, including a push this legislative session.
Elsewhere in Florida
The Florida House passed a bill that will allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work longer and later hours (more than 30 hours a week when they are in school, and more than eight-hour shifts). Opponents say it would open the door for the exploitation of child labor and make it more difficult for those teenagers to do well in school, AP reports.
Orlando Sentinel journalists, designers and production workers staged a walkout, joining union members across seven newsrooms in a strike against the paper’s owner, Alden Global Capital, Orlando Weekly reports. Former TRD Miami reporter Amanda Rabines, now a breaking news reporter for the Sentinel, was part of the strike and said having a robust newsroom is “an essential part of democracy.” The employees protested Alden’s refusal to pay fair wages, threat to rescind its 401(k) match, and failure to confront pay disparities.
A judge on a federal appeals court in Atlanta said Florida’s law restricting Chinese investment in real estate “blatantly violates” protections against discrimination. The panel of judges granted an injunction for two of the plaintiffs suing over the law, according to Politico.
The year started on a bullish note for L.A. residential sellers, with a solid uptick in signed contracts and an increase in listings in January.
During the first month of the year there were 1,650 signed contracts, a 5.4 percent increase from the 1,565 new signed contracts in January 2023, according to information collected in the Elliman Report. It was a 2.4 percent increase in new signed contracts compared to the previous month of December 2023.
There was a 5.8 percent increase in new listings in a year-over-year comparison. In January there were 1,932 new listings compared to 1,826 new listings for the same month in 2023. However, it was a 96 percent increase in a month-to-month comparison. In December there were 988 new listings, according to The Elliman Report.
Top agent Sally Forster Jones of Compass said that the second week of January marked a change for her 30-person group.
“Activity had become more brisk. I started getting more phone calls then,” Jones said.
One reason for the change in pace was the calendar. Home buyers and sellers typically show more interest in getting involved in the market at the start of the year, Jones said. She also noted there has been a lot of pent-up demand after 2023 which was seen as a slow year for the real estate market.
A bullish stock market has made buyers more confident with buying homes. Many buyers want to get ahead of housing trends.
“There’s more of an urgency,” Jones said. “Buyers are stepping up now because prices will increase in 2024.”
Economists such as Sam Khater at Freddie Mac forecast that home prices would increase at a steady rate across the nation.
The Los Angeles condo market showed new life in January, according to The Elliman Report. There were 606 new signed contracts for L.A. area condos during the month, a 16.8 percent year-over-year increase. There also was an about 8 percent increase in a month -to-month comparison from new signed contracts in December, when there were 562 new signed condo contracts.
There was a 97 percent month-to-month surge in condo listings. In January, there were 790 new condo listings compared to December when there were 400.
