By Darrell Hofheinz, Daily News Real Estate
Single-family Q4 home sales were up by more than 300 percent year over year, sales analyses show, with 2020 sales volume setting records in Palm Beach.
It was the boom few would have predicted.
But one of the unanticipated effects of the coronavirus pandemic was that it helped light a fuse that sent Palm Beach real estate skyrocketing to record-setting heights in 2020, capped by a burst of fourth-quarter sales documented in a new round of sales reports.
The total number of single-family transactions — 289 — in Palm Beach last year jumped 122% over the previous year, according to the fourth-quarter report prepared by agent Suzanne Frisbie at Premier Estate Properties. And 2020 ended “with often-staggering, record-breaking highs,” Frisbie wrote in her report.
“Year over year, 2020 experienced an incredible 96% increase in total dollar volume with a record-shattering $2.4 (billion) in sales volume,” Frisbie wrote.
The year-over-year percentage increase in the number of single-family deals during October, November and December was even greater than that recorded for 2020 as a whole, according to the report released by Brown Harris Stevens. The total number of single-family sales that closed in the last three months jumped a staggering 342% —from 19 transactions in 2019, to 84 in the year just ended.
It’s no wonder broker Linda Olsson of Linda R. Olsson Inc. called 2020 “a year for the record books” before noting in her report that prices were “higher than ever on a per-square-foot basis.”
Condominium and co-op sales were not quite as robust as the single-family transactions, the analyses show. But they more than held their own, according to the fourth-quarter report commissioned by Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
Multi-family sales “surged at the highest rate in two years, with the fourth quarter seeing the most condo sales in 14 years,” said New York-based analyst Jonathan Miller, who compiles The Elliman Report.
The sales reports issued by real estate firms that do business on the island use different sales and source criteria, so apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult to make.