Clearwater Real Estate Market Statistics – March 2014

The local real estate market here in Clearwater, Clearwater Beach and the rest of Pinellas County has been very strong for a couple of years now and last year was the strongest in the last 7 years both in sales and price increases.

No market can continue forever on the kind of pace we’ve been seeing and I’ve been expecting both the increase in sales and price to slow down some and that is what we saw in March. From January 2012 through September 2013 we had 21 consecutive months with increased sales over not only the same month in the previous year but over the same month in each of the previous 5 years. Oct – Dec 2013 broke that trend and then in January we saw an increase again. February was even with last year and then in March we saw a slight drop from March of last year. But even so, all of these months since last Oct that weren’t higher than the same month in the previous year were higher than the same month in every one of the other years back through 2007.

Inventory also started to rise in October of last year and since then has been higher than the same month in the previous year. In March we almost got back up to where we were in March 2012 but, even so, the inventory numbers throughout 2012 were too low and were in the seller’s market range. Last year was extremely low so this is an improvement but we need to get back up into the 5-7 months inventory range to be in a more balanced market.

Here are the sales and inventory graphs showing what I described above:

Information for charts above was taken from PRO/Suncoast MLS from Jan 2007 thru May 2011 & from the MFRMLS for May 2011 thru March 2014. This information may or may not include all listed expired, withdrawn, pending or sold properties of one or more members of the My Florida Regional Multiple Listing Service.