Every day I look at new listings on Anna Maria Island and in Cortez, and every day I’m surprised and ask myself when it will end. In the years leading up to COVID-19, I would analyze over $1 million properties listed on the Island and in Cortez. Now that exercise seems quaint, almost peculiar and it all changed in a short three-year period.
Because of these extraordinary listing numbers, which I see every day, I did a quick analysis of available properties in the three cities of Anna Maria Island and Cortez, researched on the Realtor.com website as of this writing. Rather than use $1 million as my breaking point, I upped it to $3 million, so get ready for this:
The city of Anna Maria had 82 properties listed, 44 of which were $3 million or over, almost half. The top property was listed at $16,995,000. Every million-dollar category was represented, and, except for the very top listing, there wasn’t a big gap between the categories.
Holmes Beach and Bradenton Beach, which are combined by zip code on Realtor.com, had 179 properties listed, 45 of which were $3 million or over. The top listing number was $22,500,000 and, like Anna Maria, except for the very top, the listing prices represented every million-dollar category.
Even Cortez has a new listing at $3,750,000 with the rest of the 12 listings hovering in the mid- to high-million dollar range.
Sales of properties in the high-end market around the country are slowing. The high-end and luxury market nationwide is defined as the top 5% of homes and they’re suffering from the same issues the regular old real estate market is struggling with, low inventory and high interest rates.
Redfin’s analysis reports that in the first quarter of 2023, the sales of high-end properties were down by 33% from the first quarter of the previous year. They feel this is the result of the frenzy during the pandemic as well as inflation and a volatile stock market.
The markets with the biggest drop in transactions for the three months that ended June 30 are also the metro areas that were unstoppable during the pandemic: Miami was down 40.14%, Nassau County on New York’s Long Island was down 39.34%, New York City was down 35.98%, Los Angeles was down 36.17% and Chicago was down 34.13%.
Miami and New York City are starting to show signs of life. Miami is still recovering from the mass migration and buying frenzy during COVID-19, and inventory has not been resupplied. And New York is New York and will always come back to life with the suburban high-end areas around it following. However, it appears that Los Angeles and Chicago will take a little longer based on residents leaving Los Angeles for lower tax states and Chicago residents leaving because of crime.
Based on the number of pending properties, it looks like Anna Maria Island is also slowing but we are in the worst part of our off-season with heat alerts and record-breaking temperatures, so we won’t have a clear idea until later in the year. Typically, Anna Maria Island, and Florida in general, has outpaced most of the country in growth and the real estate market has followed along.
The combination of Anna Maria, Holmes Beach and Bradenton Beach had 89 properties listed at $3 million or over, all on a 7-mile spit of land. I think I’ll stop asking myself where it will end because I don’t know and neither does anyone else. Such is the nature of real estate.
