If you want to know where a housing market is heading, don't watch the luxury homes. Watch the cheapest ones. The low end of the market is the most sensitive to interest rates, first-time buyers, and investors — so it turns first. It's the canary in the coal mine. In Citrus Hills, that canary is Greenbriar.
Greenbriar is the condo village — compact two-bedroom units built in the mid-1980s, the most affordable way to own inside Citrus Hills. It's also where, over the last three years, we have the cleanest read on what's actually happening to prices. So we pulled every Greenbriar sale from January 2023 through today — 61 closings — and the picture is unmistakable.
The number that cuts through the noise
Median prices in a small condo village bounce around, because a 990-square-foot unit and a 1,320-square-foot unit are both "a Greenbriar sale." So the honest way to measure it is price per square foot, which cancels out the size mix. And on that measure, there's no ambiguity:
That's a steady, year-after-year slide — from $177 a square foot in 2023 to about $121 today, a drop of roughly 32%. It isn't one bad month or one cheap sale. It's three straight years of the same direction.
And it's not just price. The same units that sold in under a month in 2023 are now taking about four months to find a buyer, and 2026 sellers are closing at only about 82% of what they originally asked. Homes are worth less, taking longer, and giving up more at the table. All three needles point the same way.
This is the COVID bubble finishing its exit
Remember what 2021 and 2022 did to the cheapest homes. When money was nearly free, the entry-level segment got the most overheated — bidding wars on starter condos, cash offers over ask, buyers priced out of houses piling into anything they could afford. The low end didn't just rise in the bubble; it rose the most.
So as the air comes out, the low end gives the most back. What you're seeing in Greenbriar isn't a crash — it's a normalization. Prices are settling back toward where they stood before the bubble inflated them. The froth is gone. In Greenbriar, we're basically back.
The low end rose the most on the way up. It's giving the most back on the way down. That's not a collapse — that's the bubble finishing its exit.
Why the rest of Citrus Hills should care
Here's why a few dozen condo sales matter to someone selling a $450,000 home three villages over: the low end leads. What happens in Greenbriar first tends to ripple up into the mid-market next. We're not saying every village is about to drop 32% — the higher-priced, lower-supply villages like Presidential and Celina Hills are still moving fast and holding their prices. But the direction of travel is set at the bottom, and the bottom has been cooling for three years straight.
What that means depending on where you stand:
- If you're buying — especially at the entry level — this is the best negotiating leverage Citrus Hills has offered since before the pandemic. Homes are sitting, and sellers are moving on price.
- If you're selling — price to today's market, not to the number your neighbor got in 2022. The 64% of Greenbriar listings that failed to sell this year were almost all chasing yesterday's price down.
- If you're holding — there's no fire. A normalization back to pre-bubble footing is healthy, not a reason to panic.
We watch this corner of the market every month, because it tells us where the rest of Citrus Hills is going before the rest of Citrus Hills knows it. When the canary changes its tune, you'll read it here first.