"You can buy Florida real estate at 50 cents on the dollar"

I am a little tired of reading the doom and gloom articles about the Sarasota Florida real estate market. A client from Canada sent me an article from one of his newspapers about the Florida market. Like so many other articles it talks about how bad it is here. I am not saying these reporters are completely wrong. But some of them are blowing things out of proportion. One of them stated that you can buy real estate here for 50 cents on the dollar.

The reason I bring this up is because I had a client over the weekend who wanted to put in a rediculously low offer on a home that is already priced well. When I checked the recently sold homes in the community the home they were interested in was within 10% of those prices. My client wanted to submit an offer of about 60% of list price. After analyzing the recently sold homes in the community he agreed that there was little chance of getting the home at that price.

The December statistics from the Sarasota Board of Realtors show that the average sales price to list price for sold properties is 90%. In November it was 93%. January numbers should be out soon. Over the last year it is consistently between 90%-93%.

I checked MLS for all of the single family home and condo sales in January for Longboat Key, Siesta Key, Lido Key, Bird Key, Casey Key, Lakewood Ranch and Sarasota. In this specific area there were 247 sold properties (don't confuse these numbers with all of Sarasota county).

Of the 247 properties:

6 properties sold from 66% - 74% of list price
241 properties sold 75% of list price or over
81% of the properties sold for more than 85% of the last asking price
59% of the properties sold for more than 90% of the last asking price
24% of the properties sold for more than 95% of the last asking price

It is not all sunshine and rainbows out there but it is not as grim as some believe. Arm yourself with the facts not the opinions of a reporter spouting doom and gloom in an effort to sell newspapers.

Good news:

Currently there are 468 properties under contract in the area I mentioned above.

There are 697 properties under contract in the Sarasota MLS. Not all of the Manatee county transactions are reported in the Sarasota MLS so this number will actually be larger.