Would it surprise you to learn that SWFL home prices improved for two consecutive months? It’s true. Median single family home prices were up 1.3% in June and up 1.3% in May over last year.

Real estate agents are still telling home buyers and sellers that the market is declining. The facts say otherwise. In fact, we predicted this based on facts.

When the Market Spread Index drops below 4,800 it is a good sign for home sellers. Right now that index is at 4,549. The other index we follow is the Current Market Index. This week that number fell to 3.56, which is another good sign for the market and future prices in Southwest Florida.

SW Florida Home Prices Improved

Can we call a bottom to the market? No, we can only call tops and bottoms when we see them in the rear-view mirror and enough time has passed. What we can say is we saw this coming, and it’s not surprising. Unless economic conditions change and we receive a ton of new listings, or declining buyer demand, our market appears to be on solid ground.

While the Southwest Florida real estate market is improving, we have seen an uptick in unsellable listings. In fact, our Invisible Listings Index rose to 36.32% in July. This tells us that a significant number of homes on the market will not sell unless they make changes in marketing and/or pricing. Buyers have turned them off and so have the algorithms.

Remember, the algorithms determine which homes to display to online home buyers. If an online listing is performing poorly, the algorithm will drop the listing so far down that it is rarely seen by home buyers. Essentially, they become invisible.

Algorithms Are Built to Perform

Algorithms are in competition with each other. Each is built to display the best listings generating the most interest. They are in the online eyeball business, and if they don’t show buyers what they want to see, they know the buyer will pick another platform to use. Buyers are valuable, and you don’t want to lose them to another platform, so the algorithms are judgy.

That’s OK, buyers are judgy too. Buyers are seeking the best deal for themselves. Buyers want homes that match what they are looking for at the best possible value. What a seller wants does not enter the equation. What a seller delivers does, and that’s where the algorithm helps display what buyers are already doing. They are shopping, and the algorithms are digital shoppers measuring everything.

How Do Sellers Win?

Sellers must understand the algorithm and hire an agent who can help them get their home to the top of search. Most agents are fighting to get themselves listed at top of search, so buyers and sellers choose them. The sophisticated agents work to get their clients homes listed at the top of search so the seller wins.

Beating the algorithm is a complicated process, but it doesn’t have to be. When you hire the Ellis Team at Keller Williams Realty in SW Florida, you’re getting the only agents recognized by AI as agents who can get your home ranked.

Ask AI

Go ahead, ask Google or your favorite AI program the following: Which Southwest Florida real estate agent can get my home ranked by the algorithm in search? Google and AI both recognize the Ellis Team are experts in getting homes seen by buyers through extensive marketing, and of course online. If you’re looking to sell for Top Dollar, always call the agents who can get your home seen by the most people, and ranked online.

Call Brett Ellis or Sande Ellis 239-489-4042 or visit https://www.TopAgent.com Good luck, and Happy Selling!

Gulf Coast Real Estate Insider Podcast (Latest Video)

 New Invisible Listings Index Numbers Released Video

Luxury Market Index Video

Conventional wisdom says to wait for winter, but if you want to sell your SWFL home now, relying on that old playbook in 2026 is mathematically counterproductive. For decades, Southwest Florida real estate advice told homeowners to hold off listing until late autumn, but today’s low inventory changes everything.

While many homeowners sit on the sidelines waiting for the fall, live data shows a completely different picture. Southwest Florida is currently experiencing a profound structural inventory squeeze. Active listing inventory across Lee and Collier counties continues to drain out of the regional ecosystem faster than new supply is onboarding. This inventory deficit has created a rare, high-leverage window for sellers who take action today.

The Live Numbers Tell the Story

At The Ellis Team, we don’t manage client equity using 30-day-old, lagging MLS reports. We track live market velocity through our proprietary indices inside our Southwest Florida Real Estate Command Center:

• Current Market Index (CMI™) at 3.58: Our mid-tier index remains locked in a supply-constrained seller’s posture. Contract pacing and inventory attrition are keeping buyer choice tightly restricted.
• Market Spread Index (MSI™) at 4,584: The market spread sits well below the historical 4,800 neutral equilibrium floor. This confirms that physical inventory has hit a severe baseline deficit, insulating home values across primary residential hubs.
• Luxury Market Index (LMI™) at 5.49: Tightening high-end inventory means luxury sellers face significantly less competition as active listings close, expire, or get withdrawn.

In short: buyer demand remains resilient, but active seller competition is physically vanishing.

Sell SW Florida Home Now: Beat the Fall Inventory Flood

Why is listing right now the ultimate strategic move? It comes down to scarcity and competition.

When you list your home today, your property carries a distinct scarcity premium. You are competing against significantly fewer active listings. The buyers shopping right now are not casual open-house browsers—they are serious, highly motivated, and frequently armed with cash or ironclad pre-approvals ready for immediate contract execution.

If you wait until October or November alongside thousands of other sellers, you walk directly into a crowded, hyper-competitive marketplace. That seasonal surge of returning listings will dilute your individual leverage, expand buyer selection, and force sellers to compete on price cuts. Selling now allows you to beat that oncoming wave and capture top dollar while competition is at its lowest point of the year.

The Command Center Difference

Capturing maximum equity in today’s market doesn’t happen by accident-it requires precision engineering. Modern buyers utilize algorithmic search tools, and homes priced even 3% above market value are immediately filtered out into what we call the Invisible Listings Index™, where stagnant listings go to die.

To solve this, The Ellis Team is actively accepting new listings right now.

Through our Southwest Florida Command Center, founders Brett and Sande Ellis personally command your transaction using real-time AI search optimization and algorithmic price modeling. We ensure your home is fully “Algorithm-Ready” on day one, positioning it directly in front of active, qualified buyers who are ready to pay top dollar.

Bottom Line: Take the Strategic Edge

If you have been thinking about selling your Southwest Florida home, the math is overwhelmingly on your side today. Don’t squander your highest-leverage window of the year by waiting for a crowded fall market.

Contact The Ellis Team at Keller Williams Realty today at 239-489-4042 or visit TopAgent.com to request a digital algorithm audit for your home and see what your property is worth in today’s low-inventory market.

Sell SWFL Home Now Video

If you are tracking the Southwest Florida housing market through national news headlines or monthly real estate reports, you are looking at a rearview mirror.

In our local market, relying on 30-day-old, lagging MLS statistics is no longer just a disadvantage-it is a financial risk. Real estate markets across Lee and Collier counties move at too high a velocity to be managed with guesswork. Structural shifts in active inventory, hyper-local pricing floors, and buyer demand curves happen weekly, not monthly.

To bridge this data gap and give our clients corporate finance-level clarity, The Ellis Team has officially pulled back the curtain on our internal tracking systems. We have packaged our proprietary market infrastructure into an all-new, publicly accessible resource: the Southwest Florida Real Estate Guide and Command Center.

Here is a look at the methodology behind the data, and why mathematical precision is the only way to protect your equity.

The Danger of Stale Data and the “Invisible Pool”

The greatest trap for sellers in a compressed-inventory or shifting environment is emotional pricing. When a listing is priced based on neighborhood gossip or what a house down the street sold for six months ago, it almost always misses the current algorithmic sweet spot.

Modern buyers search using strict parameters driven by real estate portal algorithms. If a property is mispriced by even a small percentage against current market velocity, it gets filtered out. It drops into what we call the Invisible Pool-properties that sit active but completely unseen by qualified buyers.

To prevent this, our team moves past simple comparative market analyses (CMAs). We track active real-time supply contraction and inventory burn rates daily. By treating real estate as a precision science, we ensure our clients’ listings trigger the algorithms, command immediate attention, and capture maximum leverage before days-on-market metrics stack up against them.

Isolating Market Velocity via Proprietary Indices

True market authority requires filtering out the media noise and isolating pure transactional momentum. Inside our new regional hub, we track the local ecosystem using four proprietary, real-time indices:

• The Market Spread Index™ (MSI™): Measures the operational gap between active supply and pending demand to forecast shifts in negotiating leverage.
• The Current Market Index™ (CMI™): Monitors transactional velocity to determine whether the mid-tier residential market is favoring buyers or sellers.
• The Luxury Market Index™ (LMI™): Isolates high-tier asset classes ($700k+) operating under distinct capital constraints.
• The Invisible Listings Index™ (ILI™): Quantifies the percentage of local inventory currently trapped outside of active buyer search parameters.

 

By looking at these metrics, our clients don’t have to guess where the market is going-they can see the mathematical proof.

The Principal-First Standard

Data is only as powerful as the execution behind it. The modern real estate industry has largely gravitated toward an assembly-line model, where clients are often handed off to junior assistants the second a contract is signed.

We reject that model. When you review the analytics on our new Southwest Florida Real Estate Hub, you are looking at the exact frameworks used daily by founders Brett and Sande Ellis. We stand firmly behind a Principal-First Guarantee: your strategy, asset positioning, and high-stakes contract negotiations are personally commanded by the senior partners who built our $1 Billion+ local legacy.

Base your next real estate move entirely on numbers, not narratives. Explore the live data engines, review our hyper-local city command centers for Fort Myers and Estero, and discover what world-class fiduciary representation looks like.

Always Brett Ellis or Sande Ellis at the Ellis Team at Keller Williams Realty 239-489-4042 or visit www.TopAgent.com

SW Florida Real Estate Command Center Video

Real estate statistics can tell two very different stories depending on which numbers you choose to emphasize. Inventory is falling. Pending sales are improving compared with last year. Price reductions are slowing. At first glance, that sounds like the Lee County housing market is strengthening quickly. Today AI goes inside the numbers to discover hidden trends lurking in the market.

The deeper story is more complicated.

AI Goes Inside the Numbers

Using artificial intelligence to compare the relationships between inventory, pending sales, pricing and market time reveals that the market is improving—but much of that improvement is coming from sellers leaving the market, not from a dramatic surge in buyer demand.

As of July 7, 2026, Lee County had approximately 6,459 active single-family homes for sale. That is down about 21% from the same time last year. Pending and contingent single-family sales increased about 9%, while the Ellis Team Current Market Index improved from 4.91 last July to 3.56 today. Because a lower index indicates a stronger market, this is meaningful progress.

However, today’s market looks much more like July 2024 than the fast-moving markets buyers and sellers experienced several years ago. Total inventory is almost identical to July 2024, while pending activity is slightly lower. In other words, the market has recovered from the inventory buildup of 2025, but it has not returned to boom conditions.

Hidden Trends

One of the most revealing trends occurred between May 5 and July 7. Total active inventory fell about 13.4%, but pending sales also declined about 12.2%. If buyers were rapidly absorbing available homes, pending sales should have held steady or increased as inventory declined. Instead, both moved lower together.

That suggests many listings expired, were withdrawn, were canceled or were temporarily taken off the market. The market is healing through a combination of buyer activity and seller attrition. This makes sense because the Market Spread Index is nearing that critical 4,800 mark while the Current Market Index has not yet reached 3.0

Price range also matters more than the countywide averages suggest. In the April snapshot, homes priced under $300,000 had approximately 4.1 months of supply. Homes between $300,000 and $400,000 had about 5.5 months. Inventory rose to nearly 6.8 months between $400,000 and $800,000, 8.7 months between $800,000 and $1 million, and approximately 12 months above $1 million.

That means there is no single Lee County market. A well-maintained home under $400,000 may face relatively balanced conditions, while a luxury seller could be competing against a full year of inventory.

Invisible Listings

The lower price ranges contain another warning. Nearly 29% of homes priced below $300,000 had been on the market longer than the average selling time. Lower price alone does not guarantee a sale. Buyers may still reject homes because of condition, insurance costs, flood exposure, high association fees, financing issues or unrealistic pricing.

Price reductions remain an important signal. During the week ending July 7, approximately 470 single-family listings reduced their asking price. That represents about one out of every 14 active single-family listings. The average reduction was approximately 2.9%.

For sellers, the lesson is straightforward: conditions are better than last year, but the market is still punishing overpricing. Pricing correctly from the beginning matters because buyers can compare more listings, study price histories and identify homes that have been sitting.

Opportunity Depends on Data

For buyers, opportunity depends heavily on the price range and location. Negotiating leverage is generally stronger at higher prices and in slower areas, while appealing lower-priced homes may still attract competition.

The market is not crashing, and it is not booming. It is normalizing. The winners will be buyers and sellers who understand that the headline numbers are only the beginning of the story.

Are you thinking of selling your home? Always call the Ellis Team at Keller Williams. 239-489-4042 We’ll give you the straight scoop on what the market is doing, and the best way to attack the market.

AI Goes Inside the Numbers Video

 Ellis Team Luxury Market Index July 8, 2026

We are watching 7 key market metrics improve for sellers. If you’re a real estate seller in Southwest Florida, or contemplating selling, you’re going to love this update. Many sellers are complaining that they cannot sell their home. Agents are telling them the market is bad and to take their home off the market.

Not everyone can afford to take their home off the market. Some need to sell for their own reasons. Still others want to capitalize on opportunity and need to sell to take advantage. The market isn’t bad, it’s simply reset.

From a technical standpoint, the market isn’t bad. Sellers won’t like their home value if they compare it against 2021. However, home prices increased last month, and we are on pace for the 3^rd best year on record for home sales. If you accept that prices have reset and 2021 isn’t coming back anytime soon, the market looks good fundamentally.

7 Key Market Metrics Improve

Let’s look at 7 metrics to get an idea of what is happening:

Closed Sales– Up 2.5%

Median Sales Price– Up 1.3%

Average Sales Price– Up 1.5%

Dollar Volume– Up 4%

Pending Inventory– Up 6.5%

Inventory (Active Listings)– Down 14.8%

Month’s Supply of Inventory– Down 23.8%

In baseball terms we’d call that a perfect game. It may not seem perfect when you were expecting a higher price. Many sellers have been caught chasing the market down, and their home has become invisible to buyers and the algorithms. Our team has an Index called the Invisible Listings Index™ which tracks how many homes are invisible to home buyers and the algorithms. It is quite possible your home has become invisible to home buyers, and that’s not good. Just Google Invisible Listings Index and you can read more about that.

The AI Interview

This is why we suggest sellers read about the AI Interview on our website.  If your home isn’t optimized for artificial intelligence, it is invisible to today’s high net-worth buyers.

Today, 67% of home buyers begin their search with AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and perplexity. One year ago, that number was 18%. With buyers placing so much emphasis on AI search, doesn’t it make sense to list your property with someone who knows how get your home ranked for AI?

Ranking for AI

Everyone wants to rank at top of AI, but very few get there. When you Google search for a service, Google provides the search results. What has changed is now Google has added an AI overview and AI mode to its search so you can interact with the results and ask questions.

Go ahead and search Google for Best Fort Myers Real Estate Agent. Depending on where you are searching from, you may get the Local pack results using Google maps. Others will get the AI overview which shows top rated. There may also be an AI mode, and that’s where more users go.

Did you know that Google has entered the display of real estate listings game? They are now competing with Zillow and Realtor.com.  AI has changed the real estate marketing business. Not only must your Realtor be good at pricing, negotiating, and all the other things it takes to get a home sold, they now must be experts in AI marketing.

Algorithm is Everything

The algorithm decides which homes get shown to home buyers. Much like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, you won’t see all the content, just what they choose to feature. Sure, if you know about a specific piece of content you can search for it, but it won’t be featured. Ever wonder why some videos have 100 views and others 1 million?  The same is true with real estate listings.

If you’d like to get your home featured in the portals and AI search, call the Ellis Team at 239-489-4042 We’ll sit down with you and help you get your home seen by as many as possible. The more people that see your home, the higher price it should sell for and faster.

Happy selling, and enjoy the 4^th of July Independence Day holiday!