Exciting Signs Of A Housing Market Recovery

We have not had much great news lately regarding a housing market recovery in Tallahassee, so rather than focus on more negative news, I went out and found a Florida city that is in the midst of it's own real estate rebound. I want to contrast a real estate graph from Tallahassee with a similar one from Tampa in order to demonstrate exactly what we will be monitoring and awaiting as we all pull for a resumption of better times.

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If I've said it once, I've said it 1,000 times ... We will know when the housing market recovery begins before it happens if we just monitor the supply and demand for real estate in Tallahassee. With this in mind, I have prepared a real estate graph from the data gathered for the most recent Tallahassee housing report in order to show the relative supply of homes for sale in Tallahassee, organized by price range.

How To Anticipate A Housing Market Recovery

In the real estate graph above, current homes for sale in Tallahassee are shown in red, while sales last month are shown in green. The relative supply of homes, measured in months of supply, are shown in blue. The yellow band covers the region of the graph where the relative supply of homes would be at market equilibrium (balance of supply and demand), and as you can see, there is no price range that meets this criteria. The market is still heavy on supply and light on demand.

Tampa Housing Market Recovery Is Underway

The real estate graph below was assembled in the same manner as the one above, but note how the results are quite different. This is what the beginning of a housing market recovery will look like when the same things start to happen in the Tallahassee real estate market.

Observe how the blue line (relative supply of homes) falls inside of or below the shaded yellow area for all home price ranges below $250K in Tampa. The orange arrow graphic shows that the buyer's market is still in effect for prices above this point, but Tampa is clearly on the mend with a significant portion of their housing market at equilibrium.

Housing Market Recovery Still Out Of Reach

The housing market recovery in Tallahassee has quite a ways to go. I suspect that relatively speaking, we far out-built our needs during the boom of the housing market when compared to Tampa, and our supply of homes has been weighing us down for years. This means that people who want to sell a home in Tallahassee need to make a decision. They should either opt to hold on to their property for 5 or more years, or decide to sell it immediately. Home prices will continue to fall in Tallahassee until we find our own housing market recovery.