Data Analysis

The Florida Keys is the one county in the state with no official monthly housing figures. Its median rose 4.3% in July

Florida Realtors publishes twenty-two metropolitan areas. Monroe County is in none of them. Here is what the month looked like anyway.

When Florida Realtors released July data on Monday, it covered twenty-two metropolitan statistical areas from Pensacola to Miami. Monroe County appears in none of them.

That is not an oversight. Metropolitan statistical areas are federal definitions, and Key West is classified as a micropolitan area rather than a metropolitan one, so the Keys fall outside the table entirely. Every other market we cover can be checked against a published figure. This one cannot.

Monroe closed 167 residential sales in July by our count, up 7.1% from 156. The median sale price was $970,000, up 4.3% from $930,000.

The Keys are slow and getting quicker

Half of what sold went under contract within 79 days, down from 97. That is an 18.6% improvement and it still leaves Monroe among the slowest markets in Florida, behind only Collier on time to contract.

Sellers received 92.8% of original list price, up from 88.2%. That 4.6 point improvement is the largest of any market in this release. A year ago the typical Keys seller gave up nearly twelve cents on the original dollar. In July it was seven.

Slow, expensive and improving on both counts, with the second-highest median in the state.

Why the absence matters

A market with no official figure is a market where whatever number circulates goes unchecked.

For every other Florida market, we run our own aggregates against Florida Realtors' before publishing anything. That check is the reason five of our market pages carried wrong closing counts for weeks earlier this month and no story was written from them: the comparison caught it. In Monroe there is nothing to compare against.

So the standard here has to come from somewhere else. Our Monroe figures are computed from the Florida Keys MLS feed, which is the board covering the county, and the county has a single MLS rather than the overlapping feeds that complicate coverage elsewhere in Florida. That is the strongest argument for these numbers, and it is not the same thing as a second source confirming them.

What this does not mean

A 4.3% rise in the median does not mean Keys property values rose 4.3%. At 167 closings across a county that runs from Key Largo to Key West, the mix of which islands and which price bands traded moves the midpoint on its own.

A $970,000 median does not describe a typical Keys home in any useful sense. It is the midpoint of one month of transactions in a county with an unusually wide price range.

The improvement in sale-to-original-list does not mean sellers are getting their asking price. Seven cents off the first ask is still a wide concession by the standards of most Florida markets.

None of these figures is an appraisal.

If you are in this market

Buying in Monroe means the longest timeline and the widest negotiating room of almost anywhere in Florida. Half of what sells takes more than eleven weeks to go under contract, and sellers are accepting about 93 cents on their original number.

Selling there, the pattern in the data is a long marketing period followed by a meaningful concession. The concession has narrowed by nearly five points in a year, which is real improvement, and it has not closed.

If you own in the Keys and are not selling, a county median across 167 sales does not describe your property.

Limitations

There is no independent monthly source for Monroe County housing statistics that we know of. Florida Realtors does not publish it, so every figure in this article rests on our own aggregates from a single MLS feed and cannot be checked against a second dataset. That is a weaker evidentiary position than any other market we cover, and it is stated here rather than left for a reader to discover.

At 167 closings, month-to-month percentage changes in this county are volatile. Read direction rather than magnitude.

Monroe's new-construction and resale counts reconcile to total closings this July but did not a year ago, so no new-construction comparison appears here.

Our figures are preliminary and move as late closings report.

Sources and links

• Florida Realtors, Statewide by Metropolitan Statistical Area, July 2026, which does not include Monroe County
• Data hub: /data/florida-keys/
• Tool: /tools/florida-flood-insurance-calculator.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.