Article posted in the Herald Tribune, November 16, 2011
By: Harold Bubil
Sarasota-Bradenton — and five other Florida markets — made a list of metropolitan areas leading the nation’s real estate recovery.
The local market was No. 6 on Realtor.com‘s “Top Ten Turnaround Towns” list, released on Wednesday.
But the North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota area scored higher — No. 1 — on Trulia.com‘s “Metro Movers Index,” also released on Wednesday.
That calculation by the Internet real estate site, which logs 100 million property views each month, found six times as many “inbound” home searches by outsiders for this region as “outbound” by local residents.
The two lists were affirmations of what many in the region’s real estate industry already knew: that the Southwest Florida real estate market is showing a dearth of home inventory harkening back to the boom, that prices have been stable for nearly all of 2011, and that hungry investors from both the United States and abroad continue to actively scour the region for bargains.
“This is what we are seeing,” said Carol Clark, a Realtor with Signature Sotheby’s International Realty in Sarasota. “We were the first into the collapse and now it is looking like we are the first out.”
The Realtor.com analysis found that:
• Sarasota-Bradenton attracted 11 percent of Florida’s international buyers.
• List prices in the market are up 17.5 percent from 2010.
• The number of days a home spends on the market before being sold is down 32 percent.
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