"You can't know where you are going until you know where you have been"

I find these charts particularly useful when I am talking to a buyer or seller. Below are charts showing inventory levels, sold and pending figures for properties in Sarasota county, Longboat Key, Siesta Key, Bird Key, Lido Key, Downtown Sarasota and Lakewood Ranch. They are quarterly charts for the last 11 years. The light green bars are inventory levels, dark green are sold properties and the red line indicates pending sales. 

Sarasota County

Cycles

As you can see Sarasota county had a fairly balanced market back from 2001 to 2003. In 2003 the real estate market heated up with hungry buyers. Many of them speculators looking to make a killing in the market. From 2003 to 2005 inventories dropped while buyers continued to have an appetite for properties. Late 2005 the buyer hunger subsided and tons of sellers put their property on the market hoping to find a motivated buyer to purchase at the elevated prices. The number of properties for sale quadrupled. The real estate bubble that the newspapers kept reporting about in 2005 did indeed burst. Fast forward 7 years to 2012 and we are back to a more normal market with sellers actually having more control than buyers. 

The story is the same for pockets of Sarasota like Siesta Key, Longboat Key, Lido Key, Bird Key and downtown Sarasota with varying degrees of severity. Look at the charts below for each area. 

Longboat Key

Siesta Key

Downtown Sarasota, Lido Key & Bird Key

Lakewood Ranch

This chart is very interesting. This is for zip code 34202 which includes Lakewood Ranch and surrounding neighborhoods. What a dramatic bubble here. There were roughly 200 properties for sale in late 2004 and then it grew to roughly 1,700 properties for sale. Notice the number of properties for sale there today. We are back down to boom levels. Rising prices on the way?

Give us a call at 941.822.0708 if we can help you buy or sell in the area. We have a small team of some of the finest agents in the Sarasota area.