FEW could have scripted the wild ride area real estate took
during the pandemic of 2020. Coming off a robust 2019,
the market looked strong and started at a good pace. Then
stopped. Then skyrocketed.
“If you told me in the spring that we would have the
year that we had, I never would have believed you,” says Michelle
Clark-Bradley, broker with Intracoastal Realty. “Everything just
shut down in March and April, even well into May, then Memorial
Day weekend everything opened up and we made up for lost time very
quickly.”
While life as we knew it continued to shift seismically, the real estate
market roared from zero to 100 mph quickly.
“We went from no or very few showings to you put it on the market
and you might be getting multiple offers over asking price within a
few hours. It has gone from one end of the spectrum to the other for
sellers,” Clark-Bradley says.
Other Realtors echo the pattern of a good start, a near stop, and
then a flurry of buying brought on, they say, by the uncertainty of
what the future would hold.
“2020 started off with a bang, but the COVID outbreak in March
stopped the market in its tracks,” says Vance Young, broker also with
Intracoastal Realty. “Honestly, I thought we were looking at a 2008
market, which was a sobering experience for anyone in the real estate
industry.”
PHOTOS COURTESY LANDMARK SOTHEBY’S INTERNATIONAL REALTY
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WBM february 2021