Coronavirus unsettles Tampa Bay’s residential real estate market
Yet as would-be buyers hesitate, some offices are busier than expected.

By Richard Danielson
Tampa Bay Times
Published: Mar 23, 2020

ST. PETERSBURG — Debbie Belkov has a renovated house for sale for $425,000 on a highly visible corner in St. Petersburg’s Lake Maggiore Shores.

It has four bedrooms, 3½ baths, a fireplace, wood floors and a couple of lioness statutes flanking the front walk. In just a week after listing it on Zillow, she got a lot of calls and planned to hold an open house over the weekend. But she called it off, she said Monday, “to protect the community and to protect future buyers, because I know there was going to be a ton of people walking through.”

That kind of concern is an example of the ways that the coronavirus shutdown is starting to make itself felt in the Tampa Bay area’s prosperous residential real estate market.

The number of houses temporarily taken off the market or withdrawn is rising. Some would-be buyers are hesitating. Complications are starting to emerge in the process of closing sales. Sellers still want and hope to sell, but increasingly don’t want strangers in their homes. So open houses are giving way to virtual tours. And no one knows what’s next.

“We’re seeing purchasing money kind of hold off due to uncertainty,” said David Singer, a Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick attorney in Tampa who works with home buyers who need zoning and variance approvals. “People are less likely to speed forward into a transaction even though there is supply on the market.”

In St. Petersburg, mortgage loan officer Jeff Crain likewise said “there’s definitely been some slowdown in the housing market.”

“We’ve had a couple of contracts — not a lot, but a couple ― (where) clients decided not to move forward, really for no other reason than the uncertainty that’s going on,” said Crain, senior vice president of mortgage lending in the St. Petersburg office of Guaranteed Rate, the nation’s fifth largest direct-to-consumer lender. "I’ve had some clients who have been pre-approved to purchase that have decided that they’re not going to look to buy at this time again due to the uncertainty with the economy and the market.

“But honestly, on the whole, my business hasn’t slowed down tremendously, especially on the purchase side," said Crain, who closed $85 million in mortgages last year, more, he said, than any other loan officer at any Pinellas County lender. "The market is still moving along well. We’re still in a great area where people want to be.” He’s not alone.

“We don’t understand why the volume of transactions is increasing,” said Vincent Cassidy, vice president of Majesty Title Services in Tampa, a division of LandCastle Title Group, which has 25 offices across Florida.

On a good day, those offices typically get 50 orders to schedule real estate closings for purchasing or refinancings. Yet on more than one day last week, they got 80 to 90 orders. That’s busier than in February. It’s busier than at this same time last year.

“We expected to see a deterioration in the number of contracts that are coming in,” Cassidy said. “That’s not happening.”

At the same time, scheduled closings for purchase contracts that were signed 30 to 60 days ago remain on track, he said.