By Drew Harwell, Times Staff Writer |
TAMPA — When Charles Dowman, a hydrogeologist moving from San Francisco, began house-hunting with his wife and two children, he sought a charming, craftsman-style home in South Tampa and didn’t mind a fixer-upper.
But after looking, and missing out on, about 35 houses, Dowman found “it was hard to find something before it got gobbled up by everyone else. It went fast.” On Christmas week, the family decided on a home that was about 50 years newer — and $100,000 more than expected.
Dowman’s ordeal showcases a number of local housing trends — higher prices and pinched inventory, which has led to a mini boom in new home building.
Tampa Bay home prices have climbed recently to their highest point in two years. Local prices in November rose nearly 7 percent over the year before, and 5.5 percent in 20 of the country’s major cities, according to Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home price indices released Tuesday.
In Tampa Bay, a typical home sold in November for $145,000, Multiple Listing Service data show. That’s well off the median price above $240,000 at the peak of the boom in 2006, but also off the bottom of about $110,000 in 2011.
Steady job growth and rock-bottom mortgage rates have emboldened demand among home buyers and investors, whose battles over tightening supplies have helped to drive up prices.
Buyers, real estate agent Liane Jamason said, “are coming up against very limited inventory and having to pay over asking price in order to even have a shot at succeeding due to the number of cash buyers and investors in the market.”
Foreclosures and mortgage debt still dog the local market: About one out of eight Tampa Bay home loans in November was at least 90 days late on payments, research firm CoreLogic said in a report Tuesday.