SI Real Estate Tampa and The Beaches

A report by the Commerce Department showed that the rate at which builders started new construction on single family homes and apartments was the highest last month than it has been in four years. Plans for continued building are set at an even higher rate than we have recently seen, a clear sign of buyers taking advantage of record low mortgage rates, low inventory and builder confidence on the rise. Not only is this good for the real estate market in general, but new home construction creates jobs which is essential in today’s economy. In the last two months we have seen a fifteen percent increase in new construction. About two thirds of this increase deals with single family homes while the other portion is made up of apartment homes. This coupled with a twelve percent increase in building permits shows that there are no plans of slowing down anytime soon. Homebuilder stocks saw am increase as a result of the increase in permits and plans to keep building. The National Asso

A report published by the web based real estate company, Zillow, shows that the amount of homes for sale fell by 19.4% in the last year! Zillow divided the statistics by price tiers. The greatest reduction of inventory has come from the top two tiers. Three metro areas of Florida made the list with Tampa, showing a year over reduction of 19.8% for the top tier, and 23.3% for the mid-tier homes. The overall average reduction in inventory was 22.9% for Tampa Florida real estate market. This should make it easy for fence sitters who are waiting on the sideline for the “right time” to list their homes. Those who have questioned selling their home for the last year are beginning to realize that they missed the bottom a while back and may be scrambling to catch up. As far as buyers are concerned, the time has passed for them to offer $10,000 under listing price. The days of low ball offers are over. Buyers are now starting to participate in bidding wars over properties that used