Lot Sales In Tallahassee Harder To Track Than Home Sales

One of the harder real estate sales in Tallahassee to track is lots (homesites). Often times, homesites are sold in bulk, so there is only 1 resulting sale in the tax records, but it might represent tens or even hundreds of Tallahassee home lot sales.

We can use the Tallahassee MLS, but the REALTOR® MLS does not contain the majority of lot sales, so the data is only a glimpse of what is really going on in the Tallahassee lot sales market. So I think the best way to do this is to use a combination of data sources as well as analyze the future potential use of the homesites themselves.

Yesterday, we had a comment from a reader (Buddy) who wrote:

How about a review of residential building lot supplies in the Tallahassee market? As you may know, I have a number of “luxury lots” to sell and MLS shows only a few sales in 2008 of product costing above $150,000 and almost none in 2009. Are lower price lots selling at all? Is there a “tipping point” in lot sale prices?

Thanks and keep up the wonderful work you are doing.

Buddy

Buddy raises several important questions that I think we can put a good estimate to with the right analysis.

Tallahassee Lot Sales Recorded In Leon County

We have been tracking recorded lot sales in Leon County, Florida since the beginning of 1991. For quite some time, average lot prices in Tallahassee did not move around very much, but the glut of lots that was the result of the Comprehensive Land Use Plan in the 1980’s was consumed by 2000, and land prices took off.

This real estate graph shows the one-year trend in both unit sales as well as average price, and we now see that the average price of a residential building lot in Tallahassee is still above $70K. Unit sales have plummeted with the rest of the real estate market, but lot sales have been showing an apparent bottom for the last six months or so.

This data comes from the Leon County Tax Appraisers data on recorded sales, so it is the most accurate and most complete data set that we can use. But it does not show us anything about current supply, so for that we must use what is available from the Tallahassee MLS.

See more charts, graphs, and analysis of Tallahassee Lot Sales