[l2ridehd]

For 3.5 years I have been tracking listed price vs selling price. I get the listing price from 3 sources. The Villages VLS listings, MLS using Realtor.com and Lylesellsfla.com and FSBO. Probably not 100%, but at least 90% plus of the available market. Then I use the county web sites to get the actual selling price. Marion and Sumter were easy, Lake a little more challenge, but also less Villages homes sold there. I had to get on a couple Realtors e-mail lists in order to get home addresses, but that was easy to do as well.

I threw out the top and bottom 5% variance. The reason for that is you will see a home on the market for 280K that sold for 335K and another 280K that sold for 190K. I was able to track down a couple of these strange sales and found that one home sold with a new golf cart, a car, and furnished and another time one was bought by a child of the owner. It helps get a truer picture of the actual market and what you as a buyer or seller could expect. I have about 3 years of this data. For the past 6 months I have only tracked Sumter county as that was where I was most interested. However the county does not seem to matter very much, Marion, Lake or Sumter.

What the data shows on average is for VLS, selling price runs 95% - 96% of asking price and for MLS its 94% - 95% and FSBO runs 89% - 91 % of asking price. Again this is an average and even by removing the top and bottom 5% there are still a few that fall out of this range on both sides.

For a while I tried to track the new home sales, but found that very difficult as most sold for just a little over asking price. I assume that is because people add some extra item. But is was still close to 100% almost every time so not worth tracking.