https://sinkholemaps.com/resources/tampa-housing-market-overview-where-opportunities-abound/The Tampa Bay Area, which encompasses three large cities in southwest Florida, is one vibrant market teeming with opportunities that real estate buyers wouldn’t want to miss. Whether you’re a property investor or an aspiring homeowner, this metropolitan area comprised of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, offers one huge fertile market to consider.
This vitality is but to be expected, because the dynamics of four counties—Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco, and Pinellas—are actually at play in the fortunes of the Tampa market. Population growth and the many positive ripple effects it brings to the local economy accounts for much of the market excitement on this region.
Top 10 in Growth
In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that almost 55,000 new residents relocated to the Tampa Bay area. This turnover put the metropolis as the 10th highest city in terms of population growth nationwide.
The bureau’s 2017 census estimate reckoned the population of the Tampa Bay area at close to 3.1 million, up nearly 1.8 percent from the 2016 reading. This growth in new residents, at this pace, even moderated a bit, considering that the area posted the 7th biggest population increase among U.S. metros in 2016. From 2010 to 2020, projections show that the Tampa metro’s population will rise 10.5 percent to 3.07 million.
Graph of U.S. Census data by Tampa EDC
Significantly, international residential real estate activity is contributing to the surge of the growth of Tampa Bay area residents. According to the 2018 survey of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), this metro accounted for 9 percent of foreign buyers in all of Florida in 2017.
Tampa came second, next only to the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro, in terms of international home buyers who chose Florida as their destination. Notably, too, Tampa attracted the whole mix of Florida’s foreign home buyers which include those from China, South America, the U.K., and Canada, the NAR study also showed.
Sustained Influx of New Residents
The good news here, especially for the players in the Tampa real estate market, is that the Tampa area could be expected to continue drawing more people domestically and internationally to its fold in the years ahead. Sean Snaith, director of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF), projected that the next wave of population growth in Florida to be more pronounced in the Tampa Bay area.