Article Courtesy of The Tampa Bay Times

By Susan Taylor Martin

Published December 11, 2015

ST. PETERSBURG — Have dozens of buyers suddenly bailed out of the proposed One St. Petersburg condo tower?

It might look that way from the Multiple Listing Service, which shows that 108 units that had been under contract in the 253-unit project were withdrawn from the market this month.
  

Not to worry, said Dave Traynor of Smith & Associates, which is in charge of sales for One St. Petersburg. "They are still hard contracts, nothing has changed," Traynor said Monday. "There's nothing negative here; all those contracts are in escrow." Workers are tearing down the old Tropicana building at 100 First Ave. N, and "things are fabulous on the project," Traynor added. When finished in 2018, the 41-story One St. Petersburg will be among the tallest buildings on Florida's west coast.

Realtors rely on the MLS as the most complete and accurate guide to residential properties that are or have been for sale. Once the seller has accepted an offer, agents generally mark the property as "under contract" or "pending with contract."

However, Traynor said, units under contract are sometimes reclassified as "withdrawn" if the developer is considering a price change — generally an increase — and doesn't want future buyers to know how units originally were priced. Realtors searching for units in a project like One St. Petersburg typically would not look at those that have been withdrawn even though complete price histories are available for all listings.

Traynor would not say if the Kolter Group, the developer of One St. Petersburg, plans to raise prices on the 150 or so unsold units. Currently, 16 units are listed as "active" and for sale on the MLS at prices ranging from $605,000 to $3.94 million.

Those 16 listings are just "a sample" of what's still available, Traynor said.

Smith & Associates is marketing two other downtown St. Petersburg condo projects for which the MLS listings more clearly reflect the current status of the units.

For Bliss, a 29-unit tower under construction on Fourth Avenue NE, the MLS shows two units as active, three as withdrawn and 24 as "pending with contract."

For the Salvador, a 53-unit building going up at 199 Dali Blvd., eight units are listed as active, two units have been withdrawn and the rest are pending with contract.

Asked why One St. Petersburg is the only project for which units with pending contracts haven't been listed that way, Traynor replied, "because we chose not to."

The CEO of My Florida Regional MLS, which operates the MLS for several Florida counties, said she had never heard of developers listing units under contract as being "withdrawn."

"If those units are actually under contract, that would be their responsibility to be correctly reported in the MLS," Merri Jo Cowen said. "I wouldn't want to comment further because I don't know what the situation (with One St. Petersburg) is, but of course we want the data to be accurate."

Traynor said "there's no conspiracy, nothing going on" with the listings that appear to have lost their buyers but are actually under contract.

"We've sold about 100 at this point; that's less than what was needed to start construction," he said. "It's a go."