Easter break in Palm Beach had real estate pros hopping with showings amid price drops
Easter week and the spring vacation break kept Palm Beach real estate professionals about as busy as the kids who furiously filled their baskets during the Flagler Museum’s annual egg hunt last Saturday.
That’s the consensus from informal conversations with several Palm Beach agents and brokers, who said they were busy in the days before and after the March 31 holiday, showing properties to buyers, discussing prices with sellers and working to negotiate deals with both.
They were making up for some lost time because of a sluggish start to the New Year, due in part to uncharacteristically wet weather during what is historically South Florida’s dry season.
The number of Palm Beach single-family-home and townhouse listings designated as “active” was hovering in the low 100s Thursday in the Palm Beach Board of Realtors Multiple Listing Service — more than real estate observers have seen in the past couple of years at this time.
A search Thursday also showed 177 Palm Beach condominiums listed for sale.
Single-family asking prices for active listings top out at $77.9 million for an estate at 1610 N. Ocean Blvd., which faces the inlet at the northern tip of the island and is listed by broker Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate.
Among the pricier new additions to the single-family category is an eight-bedroom, Mediterranean-style estate on a quiet Midtown street at 5 Via Sunny, which was listed at $44.95 million in the MLS on Monday. Built in 1998 with a two-bedroom guesthouse, the house has 11,639 square feet of living space, inside and out, and occupies a lot of about an acre on a cul-de-sac off Cocoanut Row.
The property on Via Sunny has been owned since 2007 through a Boston-based trust named after the address, property records show. Agents Paul and Pamela Birmingham of Sotheby’s International Realty have the listing.
One final note: House-hunters who shopped early in the season without buying may be surprised at the lower asking prices they’ll find right now, as the end of Palm Beach’s winter season swims on the horizon. A search of listings Thursday showed 26 single-family homes and townhouses underwent price reductions — some substantial — since the beginning of March.
During that same period, 50 condo and co-ops saw their asking prices drop, the MLS shows.
And even though the Easter Bunny is long gone, the island's agents, brokers and home sellers are hoping those price reductions will be just the right carrots to get buyers to seal deals.
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Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach real estate pros report a busy spring amid price drops
