ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The last six months have taken a toll on just about everyone and everything--including the real estate market. But, if you want or need to sell your house, you may be in luck.
A local realtor says the pandemic has had a domino effect on housing across the Tampa Bay area.
This is all about supply and demand. To put it simply, there are not enough homes for sale in this area to meet the demands of buyers, but if you are in a sticky situation trying to pay your mortgage you might end up the winner.
"Our inventory or number of homes available have dropped to something we haven't seen in 20 or 25 years," Liane Jamason said.
Jamason is the broker and owner of Dwell Real Estate in St. Pete. She says they are down to about one and a half months of inventory.
"What that means is we could essentially run out of homes to sell in a month."
She says there are several reasons for this. People who can buy homes are taking advantage of extremely low interest rates, but on the other hand, builders didn't want to start a bunch of new construction in an unsure economy. Plus, an extremely contagious virus didn't help.
"Sellers are really hesitant to put their homes on the market at the moment just because they don't want strangers to potentially be affected coming into their homes."
A seller's market could be a gift to some homeowners who have been having financial troubles because of the pandemic.
"It's the perfect time to sell if you're in that position where you have equity and you need to sell or your payments have gotten to be too much. It's a wonderful time to sell and just rent for a little while if you can because you will likely get close to your asking price or over."
But here's the tricky part, once you sell you'll need to find a place to live and that could be hard to do. If you want to buy, there's not much out there and if you need to rent, you'll likely find prices are going up. So, you'll need to make sure you weigh all your options before listing your home.
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