Broward is a buyer's market now. Most buyers are still acting like it's 2022.

For three years, buyers here had no room to breathe. You waived the inspection, you paid over ask, you wrote the letter to the seller. That market is gone. A lot of buyers just haven't updated their playbook.

The ground moved this summer. In the mid-year housing outlook that landed this month, about a third of sellers nationwide had already cut their asking price, even while 83 percent of them still expected to get full price or more. Sit with that gap for a second. What sellers want and what buyers will actually pay have split apart, and that split is where your leverage lives.

The driver is supply. New construction handed buyers more choices and more patience across the South, and demand came off the boil at the same time. Florida's chief economist for the Realtors, Brad O'Connor, made one point worth keeping: the deepest price drops are landing in the markets with the most new building, places like Cape Coral and Lakeland. That's not us.

This is where 23 years in Broward changes the read. We don't have open land to drop 500 new homes onto. Our leverage doesn't come from a builder down the street slashing incentives. It comes from one seller at a time, someone who priced for last year, watched the listing sit, and has already cut once. That seller is your opening. Not a subdivision. A person who does not want to reduce the price a second time.

So if you're buying here, stop negotiating like homes are scarce. Ask for the price. Push for help with closing costs. Take the repairs back to the seller after the inspection instead of quietly eating them. A seller who has been on the market two months and dropped once hears those asks very differently than a seller did in 2022. The buyers losing money right now are the ones who assume the answer is no, so they never ask.

And get specific with the asks. A seller sitting on a stale listing will often pay for a rate buydown that lowers your payment for the first couple of years, or cover the roof item the inspector flagged, long before they drop the sticker price another ten grand. Same money out of their pocket, sometimes better math for you. You just have to name it.

If you're selling, the lesson runs the other way. Those sellers still expecting full price are the ones who end up cutting twice, chasing the market down. Price it right in the first week or the market prices it for you, slower and for less. Those first two weeks on the MLS are worth more than any staging or open house.

None of this means values are falling off a cliff. Broward isn't Cape Coral, and I'm not here to tell you the market is cratering. The pressure just came off the buyer and moved back onto the seller, and most people on both sides are still acting like it's the market from two years ago.

If you're trying to work out which side of that shift you're standing on before you make your move, that's the conversation I have with people every week. My door is open.

Roger Averbuj, Broker | Prestige Heritage Realty | (954) 663-8461

Source: Florida Realtors, "Southern states see a more buyer-friendly market," August 2026.