Are Houses Still Selling in Jacksonville, Florida?

Yes. And in July, Jacksonville was one of only ten metros in the country where the number of homes going under contract rose from a year earlier.

The national number went the other way. Contract signings fell 2.3 percent from June and 2.2 percent from July of last year, down to the lowest level since January. That’s the National Association of Realtors’ pending home sales report, released Monday morning.

Both of those are true on the same day, out of the same release. If you own a house in Jacksonville and you’ve been reading that the market has stalled, the local line is the one written about you.

What Did the National Number Actually Say?

Contract signings fell in all four regions from June, and in three of the four from a year ago.

Northeast down 2.0 percent for the month and 0.2 percent for the year. Midwest down 0.7 for the month, up 1.7 for the year, the only region in the black. South down 2.2 for the month and 3.0 for the year. West down 4.7 for the month and 7.1 for the year, the worst of the four by a distance.

NAR’s chief economist, Dr. Lawrence Yun, put the month on rates: “The highest mortgage rates of the year hit right in the middle of summer, and that’s pulling back contract signings.”

One thing worth pinning down before those regional numbers get used for something they can’t do. NAR’s “South” runs from Delaware to Texas and holds sixteen states. There’s no Florida line in it and no Jacksonville line in it. A 3.0 percent regional drop is not a statement about your street.

Where Does Jacksonville Sit on That List?

Ninth out of the fifty largest metros, up 1.2 percent year over year.

Inside the same release is a separate ranking of the fifty biggest metro areas by annual change in pending sales, and two Florida markets are on the top ten. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach is fifth at up 2.4 percent. Jacksonville is ninth at up 1.2 percent, tied with St. Louis. Virginia Beach leads the whole list at up 17.2 percent.

That metro ranking comes from Realtor.com Economics, which NAR credits in its own release. It’s a different measurement from the national and regional percentages above it, built by a different group, and the two shouldn’t be set against each other as though one disproves the other. The national index fell. A separate count of Jacksonville contracts rose. Those are two rulers, not an argument.

I ran this exact question through a search before writing, the way somebody in trouble would at eleven at night. Page one is Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com, all showing listings rather than answering anything, plus a local television piece from May asking whether Jacksonville is the worst large housing market in the country. That question and this week’s ranking are both sitting on the internet at once, four months apart, and nothing on that page tells a homeowner which one is current.

This one is current. It came out Monday.

What Does “Pending” Actually Mean?

A contract that’s been signed and hasn’t closed.

That’s NAR’s own definition, and its footnote says the sale usually finalizes within one or two months of signing. The same footnote names what stretches that gap: trouble getting the mortgage financing, a problem that turns up on the inspection, an appraisal that comes in somewhere nobody expected.

So a pending number is a forward-looking one. It’s contracts signed in July, most of which close in August or September. It’s not a count of sales that happened.

Which is why the two Jacksonville figures floating around this week don’t cancel each other out. What closed in July came from contracts signed in May and June. What went under contract in July shows up on the closed side this fall.

Why Does a Short Sale Take Longer Than One or Two Months?

Because a fourth party has to sign off, and NAR’s list doesn’t include that one.

On an ordinary sale the parties are the buyer, the seller and the lender making the new loan. On a short sale the seller’s existing lender has to approve taking less than the balance before anything can close. That approval runs on the servicer’s timeline, not yours and not the buyer’s, and it involves a valuation the servicer orders itself.

So the gap between signature and closing on a short sale runs longer than the one to two months NAR describes for a normal sale. Often much longer. The buyer has to be someone who’s willing to sit through it, and a buyer who isn’t told that upfront tends to leave around week six.

Whether any given lender approves any given short sale is that lender’s decision on their own file. Nobody can tell you in advance how yours would go, and anyone who does is telling you something they don’t know.

What Does “Fewer Buyers Are Bidding Above Asking” Mean if I Owe More Than It’s Worth?

It means the thing that used to close the gap isn’t showing up as often.

Yun’s second line in that release: “Home prices are at record highs so houses for sale are sitting on the market longer, and fewer buyers are bidding above the asking price than a year ago, though there are large local market variations.”

For most sellers that’s a mild inconvenience. For a seller carrying a shortfall it’s the whole ballgame. When a house lists at $300,000 and closes at $312,000, that $12,000 is what covers the difference between the payoff and the proceeds. Take the overbid out and the shortfall has to be dealt with some other way, which usually means the lender agreeing to eat it or the seller bringing money to the table.

Yesterday I went through the flat condo price line in Florida Realtors’ July statewide numbers, and this is the same problem wearing different clothes. When the price doesn’t move and the overbid doesn’t arrive, the option of growing out of the gap quietly disappears. That’s a slower thing than a crash and much easier to not notice for a year.

Is a Seven-Month Low a Reason to Stop Trying to Sell?

The national index says nothing about your house, and Yun said so himself in the release.

His own phrase was “large local market variations,” in the same paragraph as the bad number. Jacksonville is one of them this month.

He also gave a longer read, and it’s his forecast rather than a fact: pending contracts are running 30 percent below their pre-pandemic 2019 level while payroll employment is 5 percent above it, and he reads that gap as pent-up demand that should come out over the next few years as supply reaches the market and affordability improves. That’s an economist’s projection about a country, and it isn’t a timeline anybody behind on a payment can plan around. But it’s the honest counterweight to a headline saying signings are the lowest since January.

What Are My Options if the Sale Won’t Cover the Loan?

There are six, and they cost different things.

Catch up and stay, if the money’s there. Ask your servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the ordinary way, if the price covers the loan and the closing costs. Ask the lender to take less than the balance through a short sale, if it doesn’t. Hand the property back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run through the court and deal with what’s on the other side of that.

Which one fits comes down to your equity, your income, your other debts, and what’s actually recorded against the property. A second mortgage somebody forgot about, an old contractor’s lien, an association balance, any of those changes the math before a buyer ever walks in.

What a short sale or a foreclosure does to your credit is a question for somebody who works in credit. What forgiven debt does to your taxes is a question for a CPA, and the federal exclusion that used to cover a lot of homeowners lapsed at the start of this year. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA, and both of those questions land outside what a real estate license covers.

Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is most of what comes across my desk. My license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this from somewhere else, a question like this goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.

If any of this is useful to you, I’m not hard to get hold of. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather say it out loud.

Jim Armstrong, REALTOR - Momentum Realty - SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.

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