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How Long Does It Take To Sell In South Tampa?

October 23rd, 2007 categories: Tampa MLS, Homes For Sale in Tampa, Tips for Sellers

Tampa_foreclosures I’m a numbers geek and the great thing about our MLS is that it’s full of numbers. If I’m looking for a particular statistic to share with a client I can grab the data, download it to my machine, open it in MS Excel and tweak it any way I see fit.

One such number that is very useful in our MLS database is the Days to Contract or DTC figure. This indicates how long a particular property was active on the market until it went under contract, aka pending.

Why is this number so important? The DTC number tells you how long it took to market the home before finding a buyer. Listing agents/brokers are required to update the status of the property to pending within 48 hours of an effective contract. We must then enter the date that the property went under contract.

So in looking at the average DTC number for a comparable set of properties, we can at least gauge how long it may take to find a buyer. This is a huge generalization because there are so many factors that determine how long it will take, pricing being the number #1 determining factor.

You can often assume that there is a buyer in the store, so to speak, whenever you first list a home for sale. If that buyer sees value at the opening price, the seller may get lucky and have a DTC of less than 5 days. If there are no buyers in the store and/or those buyers don’t see the value in the pricing, then the DTC number will certainly be higher.

But this is a big generalization. If you’re looking at these numbers you better be comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges. There may always be a buyer in the store for a South Tampa 3/2 with a pool and garage for under $400k. But is there always a buyer around for a South Tampa home priced at $5.2 million dollars? The answer, most likely, is no.

So back to the title of this post. In looking at the South Tampa residential properties that closed in September, we find the average DTC is slightly more than 106 days. By contrast, that number for September of 2006 was about 80 days, and about the same for September of 2005 as well.

And for the South Tampa residential properties that are in pending status? The average time it has taken those sellers to find a buyer is just over 136 days.

So you can see that the data we have available through the MLS database can be very valuable for home sellers and their agents in planning how to price and best market a Tampa home. A good agent can analyze this data and help home sellers make the best decisions in meeting their goals in a tough market. Getting the price in the shortest amount of time is a common goal for home sellers and their agents. Don’t underestimate the importance of the wealth of data available through the Tampa MLS.

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Data used is from the Mid-Florida Regional MLS and does not include private, non-brokered home sales.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 9:32 am and is filed under Tampa MLS, Homes For Sale in Tampa, Tips for Sellers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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