Economic Forecast: Head of leading residential real estate firm bullish on 2021

Company: Bob Glaser, in his 44th year with Smith & Associates, one of the leading residential real estate firms in the Tampa Bay region, has seen many up and downs in the market during his long career. But going into 2021, he’s as bullish as he’s ever been about the firm’s prospects for growth. The pandemic changed the way homebuyers look for properties — leading firms like Smith & Associates to quickly adapt to showing homes via FaceTime and Google Hangouts, for example — but sales didn’t slow, and prices rose because inventory, already low in 2019, dropped even further. “Some folks decided that they didn’t want to sell during the pandemic,” Glaser says. “They wanted to be safe in their own home.” On the other hand, because people were spending so much time at home, or wanting to move away from crowded northern cities, demand skyrocketed. “So many people were trying to get into the market or upgrade what they had; that’s been a stimulus to value.” 

Opportunities: That’s not to say that people aren’t leaving the area. Glaser says the relatively spread-out Tampa Bay region is too crowded for some homeowners — he cited the Florida Keys and western states like Colorado as population relocation destinations for homesellers. “That has, thankfully, opened up the market so there’s some more inventory,” he says. The coming year looks to be a big one for Smith & Associates because the bulk of its business comes from high-end, luxury condos — a class that has boomed recently and shows no signs of slowing down, with several major projects, like Virage Bayshore and the Residences at the Tampa Edition, already opened and more on the way. “We will end up ahead of last year,” he says, looking ahead to 2021’s revenue, “which is remarkable considering that we are already at $1.6 billion [in sales] at this point in December.”