I recently went over the housing market statistics for all of Hillsborough County and talked about Real Estate being so local that even in a specific county each zip code can get very different results. That is true of zip code 33647 which is known as New Tampa in the Northeast section of Tampa along the I-75 corridor.
As stated in my Hillsborough County article, the best way to compare housing market statistics is to compare a single month versus the same month a year ago, or even other years. Often the media and others compare for example December 2010 with the previous month. Unfortunately, with month to month reporting the statistics are skewed by seasonal and holiday differences.
Therefore we are going to compare December 2010 housing numbers versus December 2009. We are also going to look at single family homes, rather than all types of housing.
Hillsborough County had a 11% increase in single family homes for sale, whereas in New Tampa it increased 20.5%. For buyers, having more inventory is great as it gives more choice and better negotiating power, whereas for the home sellers it may require them to lower their asking price, or give more incentives such as seller paid closing costs to get their home sold, as more inventory generally pushes home prices lower.
For homes going under contract we had an increase of 30% in Hillsborough County, whereas New Tampa had an incredible 49% increase. Since these are the homes that will be the future closed sales, this bodes well for the coming months sales numbers.
For closed sales Hillsborough County had a year over year increase of 8.5%, while in New Tampa the closed home sales were flat with the same number of homes sold, year over year.
Overall in Hillsborough County there are approximately 8 months of inventory which is about the same year over year, 2010 versus 2009. In New Tampa the months of inventory is 6 months which is good, however at the same time in 2009 there was only 5 months of inventory. Seeing the 6 months of inventory looks great, taking the numbers in context of the year over year numbers is not quite as positive. This is not alarming and can be expected with the big increase in homes for sale in December 2010. And of course there was a huge increase of pended (homes under contract) of 49% which might bring the months of inventory back down again, at least if not too many more homes come on the market in the coming months.
The sales prices in Hillsborough County decreased by 1.1% over the past year. In New Tampa the sales prices declined 0.7% from December 2009 to December 2010, so the home values stayed just about the same over the past year.
With these numbers it is also important to remember that in December 2009, the Obama administration had the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit in place and many people were buying homes to get $8,000 from the U.S. taxpayers. Though the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit stole buyers from the future with loss of sales shortly after it ended, it appears that as 2010 closed out, home buyers are starting to come back in the market because the prices are good, rather than for an extra incentive from the government. Hopefully, more buyers will come into the market in 2011 and keep these numbers going.
It is important for buyers and sellers to choose a Realtor with knowledge of the market and the differences even between specific zip codes or down to the neighborhood.
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