Tampa Bay Real Estate Market Update

January 2020

I have your monthly Tampa Bay real estate market update. This is using stats from the Florida REALTORs® for December 2019 for the entire Tampa Bay area. So this includes Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties, looking at single family home sales. I am happy to report that the market was extremely strong in December 2019.

When you're looking at the number of homes that sold, there was a 22% increase compared to last December. That is a huge change! The biggest change we saw over the past couple of months was just over 10% so this is almost double that. So to me, that means that homes are moving off the market and they're getting sold so that's always a great thing.

Also, the median sales price jumped back up to $250,000. That's the highest we've seen since August 2019 so that's great news as well.

One thing that I noticed that I haven't seen in awhile is that the number of new listings on the market actually increased. We saw about a 5.5% increase compared to last December so that means that people are catching on and realizing that it's a great time to sell. However, inventory dropped so the total number of homes on the market at the end of December was under 10,000 homes. That's very tight inventory and extremely low. So right now there's more buyers out there than there are sellers.

Another thing I noticed is that more homes sold at higher price points. The price range that had the biggest increase in sales was the $400,000 to $600,000 price point. This range saw a 55% increase compared to last December so that's a huge jump there. The sweet spot for selling homes is still between $200,000 and $250,000. That's the price range that saw the most number of homes sold, which was right around 940 homes.

So overall, the Tampa Bay real estate market is still going really strong. To me, it looks like it's a seller's market at this point. But buyers, don't let that discourage you because you can still get excellent mortgage interest rates. So definitely take advantage of that while you can because that impacts your buying power so much.

If I can answer any real estate questions for you, please don't hesitate to reach out. Have a great day!