Zillow says rising home prices from Hurricane Ian. What’s your take?

The article in question:

https://www.axios.com/local/tampa-bay/2023/01/17/tampa-bay-real-estate-predictions-2023

Good lord is Zillow bad at this part of the industry. No wonder they lost their shirt buying houses. They’re great for mobile app user experience but their read of the market is generally horrible. See also RedFin counting Life Trusts as investment properties for why you should take these reports with a huge grain of salt…. they are mostly PR pieces handed to the reporter.
Real estate forces aren’t some mystic energy you need a economics degree to begin to decypher. It’s traditionally a very simple supply and demand problem.

Ask yourself this question: What is going to have a larger effect on real estate prices: 5000 homes destroyed by Hurricane Ian (many being secondary vacation homes on the beach or mobile homes) or demand being roughly -40% across the entire state compared to the previous year due to 6.5% interest rates … that’s a drop from 27,541 homes sold to 17,009. That’s 10,000 fewer buyers… IN ONE MONTH for the state. And that’s been 40% less each and every month for the last 5-8 monts depending on the area you’re looking. Meanwhile there are twice the number of homes on the market for sale, many sitting a long, long time (100+ days)

Dropped demand with huge increase in supply means general pressure on the market is……

Also, generally speaking, people with homes destroyed in Ft Myers wouldn’t move to Tampa Bay. Primarily because they don’t have jobs, family, or connections here, and if a vacation home they’d simply stay put in their primary residence and rebuild the vacation home instead of buying another home.

If you want actual Tampa Bay real estate market stats, trends, and analysis, I do a monthly video:

https://ashlarre.com/stats

I’ve actually revamped how I obtain the numbers so I don’t have to wait on the Florida Realtors to generate the report on the 20th, and the newest one with this new system will be dropping in the next few days.

For December we had a blip of increased buyer demand after 6 months of decline but median price has mostly held. We are still very much in seller’s market territory technically for time to contract, sale, and months supply but the overall pressure is favoring buyers currently.