Tallahassee Trails All Other Florida Real Estate Markets

I have been asked to speak about Florida real estate at the FSU Accounting Conference next month, so I've been expanding my analysis to include all of the major market areas around the State.

Now long-time readers of the Tallahassee Real Estate Blog know that we are the premiere resource specializing in charts, graphs, and analysis of the Tallahassee real estate market, but taking-on the challenge of analyzing the Florida real estate market is an altogether different challenge.

Florida Real Estate Data

The hardest part of doing an accurate Florida real estate analysis is finding good data.

In Tallahassee, I am able to cull through two data sets, and I know them so well that I can fix errors when I find them.

Just yesterday, I placed a call to one of my providers to let them know they had significant errors in their Leon County data set that they had released only one hour prior. I know Tallahassee Florida real estate, and nobody has a better understanding of what is happening here.

But Florida real estate is an altogether monster.

We all know that real estate is local, and unfortunately, so too is the data. In fact, consider this an open call to our readers for recommendations on where to find data for any Florida real estate market beyond the Tallahassee MSA.

I did reach out to the Florida REALTOR organization, but their Florida real estate data is highly suspect because they receive it from the MLS organizations around the State. These MLS sytems, much like the Tallahassee MLS, are built for marketing properties, not for creating real estate analytics.

Florida Real Estate Analysis

In order to compare Tallahassee to other Florida real estate markets, I had to create a method that would allow us to compare differing sales volumes that exist in the various markets.

My method is based upon creating a "normal" level of single family home sales for each market. Once identified, I converted this normal level to a percentage system, thus each market was deemed selling at 100% if they were achieving normal results.

Without boring the reader with too much of the "how," just know that I felt the best way to create a normal baseline was to use the annualized average number of single family detached home sales from January 1998 through December of 2002. This accounts for the age of computerized MLS systems (meaning prior data was partial) and is the best method I have devised thus far to analyze the Florida real estate market.

When we look at the Florida real estate graph above, we see single family detached home sales for both Tallahassee and Florida, compared to their normal baseline.

The blue line shows the entire Florida real estate market surged to levels 163% of normal in 2005, then dropped to a low of 77% of normal in 2008.

Tallahassee on the other hand (shown in red), exploded to 208% of normal in 2006, and then plunged to just 64% of normal in 2009.

Tallahassee Is Bottom Of Florida Real Estate Market

This single graph shows why Tallahassee trails the Florida real estate market recovery.

Simply put, Tallahassee peaked higher and later, thus it will recover longer and later. While the rest of the Florida real estate market was putting on the brakes, Tallahassee continued building and expanding and enjoying the boom.

Out of all the markets that report to the Florida REALTOR organization, Tallahassee is performing the worst. I will continue this blog in the future and include other markets as well.

Look to see more analysis of the Florida real estate market in the future as I continue to find and tabulate home sales information from around the State.