Today is Monday, and on Mondays I post about Real Estate topics. Sometimes it might be an educational post, explaining some aspect of Real Estate that I want to talk about. Sometimes, it might be a post about how we’re doing in St. Petersburg and in Pinellas County overall. Today it’s going to be the latter – PRO, the Pinellas Realtor Organization, released statistics for July last week, so I want to tell you about single family home listings and sales.
As I did last month, I’m going to begin with a disclaimer, and it’s simply this: I can’t tell you that everything’s great – there are still too many houses for sale, prices are still lower than what sellers want, and people are still being foreclosed on and losing their houses. But, in relative terms, the news is not as bad as it had been for so many months. Sales volume continues to improve and sale prices seem to have stabilized over the past few months.
First, let’s talk about single family listings – houses that are currently listed for sale in Pinellas County. At the end of July, there were 6,525 single family homes for sale. Compare that to July of last year, when there were 8,643 listings, and July 0f 2007, when there were 9,198 listings. That’s pretty noteworthy – the number of houses for sale is down 24% from the same time last year and down 29% from 2007!
As to pricing, the median sale price for Pinellas single family homes hit a low point of $125,000 back in January, but since then, it’s been in the $140,000s every month. For July, the median sale price was right at $140,000. But that includes foreclosures and short sales. If you look at numbers of ‘normal’, or non-distressed sales, the median price was $157,950 in July. For houses that were sold in a pre-foreclosure/short sale state, the median price was $120,000 for July. Finally, for houses that had already completed foreclusure and were sold as Bank-Owned/REO houses, the median price for July was $76,500, which is a 37% drop from July of 2008.
One more interesting fact about single family home sales in July – continuing a trend that began last month, the highest percentage of homes sold in all the various price ranges were not the least expensive houses. Homes selling at under $100,000 had been the leader in home sales for many months, but in June and July, that was no longer true. Homes under $100,000 made up about 30% of all home sales. Homes in the $100,000 to $200,000 range made up about 40% of all home sales, and homes in the $200,000 to $250,000 range accounted for 9% of all single family home sales.
There’s more data available, but I want to keep this light and easy to digest – just want to give you an idea of how things are going. If you have questions or would like to see any specific sort of information, either one time, or on a regular basis, please give me some feedback via a comment. I’ll do everything I can to accommodate. And if you’re interested in July statistics for condominium listings and sales, I’ll post that information next week.
[All data referenced in this post is courtesy of the Pinellas Realtor Organization and is believed to be accurate, but is not guaranteed.]
