941 Index

How it works

The 941 Index tracks single-family home prices in Sarasota and Manatee counties. It answers one question: what would the same house, in the same kind of place, sell for now compared with before?

The data

Every recorded single-family sale in both counties, from the property appraisers' public files, refreshed nightly. Only qualified, arm's-length resales count. Foreclosures, family transfers, multi-parcel deals and new construction are left out; builder pricing and incentives make new homes a different market.

Holding quality constant

Median sale prices swing with whichever homes happen to sell. A month with many waterfront sales looks expensive even if nothing changed. The index uses a hedonic regression instead. It estimates prices while holding living area, lot size, age, bedrooms, bathrooms, pool, waterfront, building quality and location constant, then follows one typical home over time. The base is the 2016 average, set to 100: a reading of 175 means that home costs 75% more than in 2016.

Recent months settle

County records arrive weeks after closing. Sarasota's arrive within about four weeks; Manatee's often take six to ten. The latest months are therefore marked provisional and can move slightly as late records come in. The headline is a current reading of the latest four weeks with enough sales, so it trails the calendar by a few weeks. Changes are measured on final months.

What the bands mean

The shaded range shows sampling uncertainty (95%): how much the number could move by chance with this many sales. It does not include every modeling choice, so treat small moves as noise.

What it is not

Sources

Sarasota County Property Appraiser and Manatee County Property Appraiser public records. The index is computed by Nick Schlabach from those records and is not produced or endorsed by either office.