Palm Beach appreciation rates and housing market information

Palm Beach housing market information

With 10,374 people, 9,897 houses or apartments, and a median cost of homes of $899,321, Palm Beach house prices are not only among the most expensive in Florida, Palm Beach real estate also is some of the most expensive in all of America.

large apartment complexes or high rise apartments are the single most common housing type in Palm Beach, accounting for 71.20% of the town's housing units. Other types of housing that are prevalent in Palm Beach include single-family detached homes (24.33%), duplexes, homes converted to apartments, or other small apartment buildings (2.49%), and a few row houses and other attached homes (1.98%). This particular housing mix is relatively uncommon and characteristic of towns that are compact and walkable, and which often have a lively downtown.

Dwellings in Palm Beach tend to be quite small (one, two, or no bedrooms) and owner-occupied. In fact, 65.38% of the homes in Palm Beach have two or fewer bedrooms.

There is a lot of housing in Palm Beach built from 1970-1994, so parts of town may have that "Brady Bunch" look of homes popular in the '70s and early '80s, although some of these houses were built up through the early '90s as well. There is also a lot of housing in Palm Beach built from 1940-1969 (36.96%). A lesser amount of the housing stock also hails from 1939 and earlier (10.95%), and some were built from 1995 and later (10.95%).

A decent proportion of the Palm Beach housing stock is seasonally occupied. That is, homes and condos in Palm Beach are occupied by people for a portion of the year - mainly for vacation purposes - and then locked up and left unoccupied for the remainder of the year as owners return to their primary residences. This characteristic of the Palm Beach housing market speaks to its popularity as a vacation location of choice.

Palm Beach home appreciation rates

In the last 10 years, Palm Beach has experienced some of the highest home appreciation rates of any community in the nation. Palm Beach real estate appreciated 165.88% over the last ten years, which is an average annual home appreciation rate of 16.58%, putting Palm Beach in the top 10% nationally for real estate appreciation. If you are a home buyer or real estate investor, Palm Beach definitely has a track record of being one of the best long term real estate investments in America through the last ten years.

Over the last year, Palm Beach appreciation rates have trailed the rest of the nation. In the last twelve months, Palm Beach's appreciation rate has been -12.54%, which is lower than appreciation rates in most communities in America. In the latest quarter, NeighborhoodScout's data show that house appreciation rates in Palm Beach were at -0.35%, which equates to an annual appreciation rate of -1.40%.

Relative to Florida, our data show that Palm Beach's latest annual appreciation rate is higher than 49% of the other cities and towns in Florida.