South Florida's condo market has tilted hard toward buyers, with unsold inventory sitting at roughly 10.6 months and active listings languishing an average of 240 days without a contract. That's the headline number real estate analyst Peter Zalewski laid out in a presentation last month, and it's a sharp signal for anyone trying to sell — or buy — a unit anywhere from Miami-Dade to Palm Beach County.
Zalewski discussed the figures alongside journalist Oscar Musibay on a recent episode of Miamees on Fire, recorded just after the midterm election, according to Miami's Community Newspapers. The two reviewed data on condo prices, interest rates, maintenance fees and buyer-market conditions, and compared vintage buildings against newer construction across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. Zalewski's own tracking, published on his Substack, put the 10.6-months figure and the 240-day listing average at the center of the conversation, writing that the numbers leave the resale market firmly in a buyers market, per Zalewski's analysis.
The imbalance shows up clearly when inventory is broken down by county. A separate inventory report dated November 10, 2026, found that condos and townhouses carried more months of inventory than houses in 68 of the 82 South Florida cities where both figures are tracked, with the report classifying those 68 markets as favoring buyers outright, according to PBP Real Estate. Miami-Dade County alone had 13.4 months of condo and townhouse supply compared with just 6.1 months for houses, the same source notes. Broward's gap ran 11.5 months for condos versus 5.1 for houses, while Palm Beach County showed a narrower but still lopsided 7.5 months against 4.5 months for single-family homes.
Hallandale Beach Leads the Glut
Nowhere is the oversupply more visible than Hallandale Beach, which the report identified as the most supplied condo market in the region at 32.2 months of inventory. That's more than four times what Palm Beach County posts on average, underscoring how unevenly the slowdown is landing from city to city.
Zalewski's data also separates the market by building vintage. Modern condos carried 13.7 months of supply compared with 9.5 months for vintage units, the Substack analysis found, even though vintage buildings made up 67% of active listings but accounted for 74% of completed sales. That gap suggests older, typically cheaper units are still finding buyers faster than newer towers, even as both segments sit well into buyer's-market territory.
Rates, Fees and the Post-Surfside Squeeze
Part of the conversation on Miamees on Fire centered on how borrowing costs ripple through the condo market. Zalewski's broader thesis, as laid out in his analysis, is straightforward: when interest rates go up, housing goes down, and the reverse holds true when rates ease. His Overall Condo Cliff Index — a gauge tracking active listings and pending sales that the same source says forecasts official closed-sales data roughly 30 to 120 days before it's published — fell 14.2% to 8.16 points in mid-October from 9.51 points in late April, reinforcing the cooling trend.
The hosts also dug into rising maintenance fees and post-Surfside reserve requirements, a subject that has weighed on owners across the region since the 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, which killed 98 people, as WLRN has reported. University of Florida real estate expert Bill Hughes has pointed to insurance as the single biggest driver behind those climbing fees, citing hurricanes and litigation as forces pushing premiums upward, according to the Miami Herald. Miami-Dade's median monthly condo association fee hit $900 from April through June 2024, more than 59% above the $567 median recorded over the same stretch in 2019, the newspaper found.
A 2025 review of high-rise buildings managed by FirstService Residential found Miami-Dade average monthly assessments topping $1,900, up almost $500 from the year before, while Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach high-rises averaged just over $1,800 a month, the Herald reported separately. The same review found the share of condo association budgets funneled into reserves rose to 12 cents per dollar, up from 9 cents the year before — a reflection of the stricter reserve funding building associations now face.
A Buyer's Market, County by County
Not every corner of South Florida is cooling at the same pace. Palm Beach County condo sales jumped more than 20% year over year in November 2025, while sales volume fell almost 4% in Miami-Dade and stayed flat in Broward, according to WLRN. Miami-Dade's median condo price fell nearly 10% over the same period, dropping below $400,000 for the first time in three years, while Palm Beach County's median price actually rose 3.2% — its first increase in nine months.
Taken together, the numbers paint a market where leverage has shifted firmly toward buyers, but unevenly — vintage buildings moving faster than modern towers, Palm Beach prices firming up even as Miami-Dade's soften, and a handful of cities like Hallandale Beach sitting on inventory that could take years to clear at current pace. For a region where, as the Miamees on Fire hosts put it, real estate has always been tangled up with people's dreams, the condo cliff is reshaping who holds the advantage at the closing table.
