With the pound and euro continuing to strengthen relative to the dollar, your hard earned cash can now stretch very far indeed. If you wanted $60,000 in late May it would have cost you around €45,000/£40,000. Now it will cost €40,000/£36,500. That's quite a difference. 

So a weak dollar is great news for those seeking to purchase US property from abroad, but as many of our readers working in the financial industry will know, the prospect of a consistently weak dollar is of real concern to finance ministers, company bosses and traders around the world.  

If one were to listen to the US authorities the message is pretty much the same every week, "it is very important for the US to have a strong dollar". They haven't been taking much action to backup that message though. 

As any first year economics student will tell you, a weak currency boosts exports and restricts demand for imports, thus improving the economy and lowering the trade deficit. This might suit the US in the short term but it certainly doesn't suit the EU or Asia, both of whom want to sell their goods and services to the US as cheaply as possible to kick start their own economies.  

The other big worry revolves around the strategies big countries like the US, Britain, Germany, Japan and China will pursue to withdraw the massive assistance they've been providing to prop up their economies. That's an article for another newsletter though.  

Florida - Very Revealing Statistics...

I've been making quite a big effort over the past six months to emphasize the speed at which the Florida market has been recovering from the credit crunch and property slowdown. Yesterday morning I received two graphs from one of my main contacts on the ground that will illustrate this far more clearly than my words have ever done.  

Graph 1: Supply in Florida has been falling dramatically for almost a year. This is because developers are not starting new construction projects and prices of existing stock have been slashed by up to 75%, thereby boosting consumer and investor demand (with a little help from US subsidies for first time buyers).  

Graph 2: The market bottomed out in December 2007 and it took another 15 months before activity reverted back to late 2006 levels. Over the past six months, it has been quite frantic, which huge volumes of new contracts being issued to a wide variety of buyers.  

Breaking through the pain barrier 

In short - developers, banks, agents, investors and homeowners all had to go through a world of pain between September 2006 and September 2009. Their counterparts in Ireland, Britain and mainland Europe have had it easy in comparison.  

Prices are still low, but they are not going lower, of that I am quite sure. There will always be good deals out there for the shrewd and well connected buyer, but the days of snapping up a high quality unit for $50-60k that used to cost $200-$230k are numbered.