Data Analysis

Tampa's sales fell 3.8% in July while St. Petersburg's rose 11.5%, in the same metro

Florida Realtors publishes Hillsborough and Pinellas as one market. The two counties moved 15 points apart on volume, and Pinellas now sells new construction at two and a half times the price of a resale.

Hillsborough County closed 1,698 residential sales in July, down 3.8% from 1,765. Pinellas closed 1,564, up 11.5% from 1,403.

Florida Realtors reports both inside the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro, which also holds Pasco and Hernando. For July it put the metro's single-family sales at 3,491, down 0.5%, and condo and townhouse sales at 1,079, up 3.4%. A metro figure near zero is the average of a county down four and a county up eleven.

Prices rose in both. Hillsborough's median was $405,000, up 3.8%. Pinellas came in at $395,400, up 4.1%.

Pinellas is where the new construction is strange

Sixty new-construction homes closed in Pinellas in July at a median of $975,000. Resales there closed at $389,000.

New construction in that county sells for two and a half times what a used home sells for, and the gap widened over the year: the new-construction median rose 12.1% while resale rose 3.7%.

Pinellas is built out. What gets built there now is mostly replacement on existing lots, much of it coastal, which is a different product from the county's standing stock rather than an addition to it. Sixty closings is a thin month, so the level should be read with that in mind, though the direction has held for years.

Hillsborough runs the other way and for a different reason. New-construction closings there fell 34.6%, from 237 to 155, while the new-construction median rose 21.5% to $473,783. Fewer new homes sold, and the ones that did were more expensive. Resale in the county rose 2.6% to $400,000.

Both counties reconcile: new-construction and resale counts sum exactly to total closings in each, which is why these figures are published here and are absent from seven of our other markets.

Speed and leverage

Hillsborough is the fastest market we cover. Half of what sold went under contract within 34 days, down from 36. Sellers received 96.5% of original list price.

Pinellas improved more but from further back. Time to contract fell to 39 days from 47, a 17.0% drop, and sellers received 94.2% against 92.5% a year ago. Price per square foot there was $283, well above Hillsborough's $228, on a lower median, which is what a county of smaller coastal homes looks like in the data.

What this does not mean

A 15-point gap in volume growth between two adjacent counties is not evidence that one is healthy and the other is not. Both had rising prices, improving concessions and faster sales in July.

The Pinellas new-construction median does not mean new homes there are worth two and a half times a used one. It means the sixty new homes that closed were a different kind of house, in different locations, at different sizes, from the 1,504 resales.

A county median is not an appraisal, and none of these figures values a specific property.

If you are in this market

Buying in Hillsborough means the shortest decision window in Florida. Half of everything sold went under contract inside five weeks.

Buying in Pinellas means more supply reaching the market than a year ago and sellers conceding closer to six cents on the dollar, which is more room than Hillsborough offers.

If you are comparing new construction in Pinellas to resale there, the two medians are not describing substitutable products. Compare within the segment you are actually shopping.

Selling in either county, the metro number in the news is averaging two different markets. Ask for county comps.

If you own and are not selling, none of these figures describe your home.

Limitations

Our county figures come from the Stellar MLS feed and are all-residential, so the single-family and condo split above is Florida Realtors' rather than ours.

Their Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metro includes Pasco and Hernando, which no hub of ours covers. Our two-county figures and their four-county figures therefore describe different geographies, and no like-for-like check between them exists. We publish ours as county figures and theirs as metro figures, and we do not net one against the other.

Pinellas new construction was 60 closings in July. At that count a handful of transactions moves the median, and the level should be read alongside the multi-year pattern rather than on its own.

Both sides are preliminary.

Sources and links

• Florida Realtors, Statewide by Metropolitan Statistical Area, July 2026
• Data hubs: /data/tampa/, /data/st-petersburg/
• Tool: /tools/florida-true-cost-of-ownership.html

Disclosure: Jon Brooks is a co-founder of Momentum Realty, a Florida real estate brokerage that owns and funds Florida Housing Intelligence. Momentum has a financial interest in Florida real estate transactions, including in markets named here. See our editorial standards.