The Average Broward Homeowner Who Bought In 2011 Is Sitting On $516,000 In Equity
A client in Davie sat across from me last month and asked a question I get more than almost any other: what is my house actually worth to me? Not the number a real estate site guesses at. The number that is actually hers, after the mortgage, after fifteen years of payments and appreciation and everything in between.
I did not have an exact figure for her that day. I do now.
MIAMI REALTORS released new county-level numbers this month, and they put a real dollar amount on something most longtime Broward homeowners have never actually calculated. If you bought a single-family home in Broward County around 2011 and you still own it today, the median owner in that position now holds roughly $516,000 in home equity. That works out to about 82% of the home's current value. Eighty-eight percent of that gain nationally traces back to price appreciation rather than mortgage paydown, and Broward tracked close behind Miami-Dade in that pattern.
The number gets bigger the further west and closer to the water you go. Southwest Ranches shows up on the county's list of the twelve South Florida municipalities where 15-year owners hold at least a million dollars in home equity, with a median figure of $1.3 million. Lighthouse Point lands on that same list at $1.2 million. These are not outliers on some coastal spreadsheet far from where most of my clients live. Southwest Ranches and Lighthouse Point are both towns I have sold in for two decades.
Condo and townhome owners fared well too, even with the recent price softness that has made headlines all year. Broward condo owners who bought 15 years ago hold about $216,800 in equity on average, an equity ratio around 83%. That cushion is exactly why a modest year-over-year dip in condo prices, Broward was down about 1.8% as of June, has not turned into anything close to a crisis for people who have owned long enough to build real equity first.
Here is what I want you to take from this, and it is not "go sell your house." It is simpler than that. Most of the equity sitting inside a Broward home right now is invisible. It does not show up on a mortgage statement, it does not get mentioned at a holiday dinner, and plenty of owners who have lived in the same house since before their kids started middle school have never once sat down and calculated what that equity actually adds up to today.
That number changes decisions. It changes whether a cash-out refinance makes sense over the next few years. It changes the math on downsizing once the kids are gone, since a paid-down or heavily appreciated home can fund a very different next chapter than most owners assume. It changes how you think about helping a child with a down payment, or bridging into a second property, or simply deciding you are fine exactly where you are because you finally know what "fine" is actually worth.
In 23 years of doing this in west Broward, I have sat with more people than I can count who were making a major financial decision, sell, hold, refinance, without ever running this specific number first. It is worth five minutes with a calculator, or five minutes with me, before you decide anything.
For the tax and lending side of pulling equity out of a home, that conversation belongs with your CPA or a licensed lender, not a real estate agent. I am always glad to run the local comps and help you understand what your specific property and neighborhood look like inside these countywide numbers.
Roger Averbuj, Broker | Prestige Heritage Realty | (954) 663-8461
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