Aaron Kessler wrote an article in Herald-Tribune Business Weekly yesterday about the Sarasota Association of Realtors sales numbers being "confusing." The SAR stats can be confusing because there are listings and a few sales in other counties in the SAR MLS system. There are also many sales that are not included in SAR statistics.

For those of you that track local real estate data, there are a few tools that can help you with you Sarasota real estate sales and inventory levels.

You can do a sales search for all Sarasota County sales at the Sarasota County Property Appraiser site - http://www.sarasotaproperty.net/scpa_sales_search.asp . If you are only interested in a particular area, you can also search by neighborhood or condo.

I did a quick search at the Property Appraiser site for all residential sales from 3/1/08 to 3/31/2008. I searched all sales over $10,000 (to eliminate transfers and refinance records). I also selected Land Use Code - "residential." It shows 904 sales in that period. Many more than the 500 or so reported in SAR March stats.

This tool has several benefits that the SAR stats do not.

1. You will get sales data in Sarasota County only
2. You will see all sales in Sarasota county including private sales, FSBO’s, etc., not just MLS sales

If you are interested in tracking Sarasota MLS inventory levels for Sarasota County only, we have a tool on our site that updates MLS inventory levels daily - http://www.buysarasota.com/Statistics-pg148.cfm

Also, if there any other statistics you would like to follow on a regular basis, I would be happy to have our programmer add a tool to that page that pulls more statistics from the IDX system. Just let me know.