Lack of Florida Mortgage Demands Leads to Closing of Miami Condo Site

CondoFlip.com is dead.

The website is a casuality of a slowdown in Florida mortgage demand around the state. It was created in 2004 to take advantage of investor requests for Miami area residential condos.

Mark Zilbert created and built the site as a flipper’s marketplace, a venue where buyers could post units for resale before the Florida condos were completed.

But the push to invest in pre-construction units has wound down. An over-supply of units has prompted first-time home buyers to sit back and see if prices fall.

Miami’s skyline saw a record numbers of new units. Over 10 years, from 1995 to 2005, fewer than 10,000 residential units were completed, city development data shows. But from September 2005 to September 2006, more than 6,000 units were completed.

The last batch of numbers from the city’s planning department listed more than 22,000 units under construction. Nearly 30,000 more units were approved but had not broken ground.

As posted on the closed site:

“The condo boom was driven by overly ambitious speculators, many of whom had been successful in flipping condos in the past. As condo inventories grew and prices rose, many speculators realized that further purchasing was increasingly risky. So, buyers just stopped buying…. We saw thousands of sellers, and very few buyers. It didn’t make sense for us to maintain a marketplace where there were few buyers.”

Zilbert, president of Miami Beach-based Zilbert Realty Group, couldn’t be immediately reached, but, in a new release, he said buyers “are now taking advantage of the growing inventories of newly completed condos, and they are looking for great deals.”

Within such a buyer’s market, it’s safe to assume that demand for home mortgages will rise again. Website builders sure hope so.