Forgotten Coast Real Estate Market Report Week of August 3 – 9, 2026

Twelve Miles of Highway 98 Did Most of the Coast's Business Last Week

Eleven closings. That is the whole Forgotten Coast for the first full week of August, down from 22 seven days earlier. Cut clean in half.

August runs on its own clock out here. The shrimp boats work the flats in the early light while everybody else sleeps in, and by four in the afternoon the storms have stacked up over the mainland and the beach empties in about ten minutes. A slow week in August surprises nobody.

What should get your attention is what inventory did while sales were cooling. Active residential listings fell to 571, down from 582 a week ago and well off the June peak of 620. Supply has now shrunk two weeks running, in the quietest stretch of the season.

11 homes traded for an average of $682,382, putting total residential volume around $7.5 million. Another 19 homes are under contract, down from 25 the week before, which means September is likely to read thinner than August did.

The part worth circling is where those sales happened. 6 of the 11 came off one stretch of Highway 98. Add the 3 lots that closed in the same corridor and 9 of the coast's 15 total transactions landed inside about twelve miles of road.

St. Joe Beach and Mexico Beach

The corridor carried everybody else this week. 6 closings ran from $318,900 to $2,250,000 and averaged $784,800. That top figure is the highest price paid anywhere on the coast last week, and it landed here instead of on the island, which is not how these weeks usually go.

Inventory came down 8 listings to 230, still the largest active count of the four areas. But 12 homes sit under contract here, more than the rest of the coast combined, and at roughly 8.9 months of supply this is the second tightest market we track. Mexico Beach spent a long time rebuilding while nobody was watching. The closing numbers have caught up to the work.

Port St. Joe

Town is the tightest market on the coast, again. 3 closings from $289,900 to $549,000, averaging $457,967, against 91 active listings. That pencils out to 7.0 months of supply, the best figure of the four areas for the second straight week.

Port St. Joe does this quietly. No trophy sale to talk about, just houses trading at numbers a working family can actually reach. Active inventory has held between 91 and 100 listings for a month while the rest of the coast swung around, and 3 more homes went under contract. Steady gets undersold.

Cape San Blas and the South Gulf

One sale out on the Cape, at $363,500, after posting 5 closings the week before. Active inventory did not move off 139 listings, and only 2 homes are under contract.

Run a single sale forward and you get something like 32 months of supply, which is a number to hold loosely because one transaction produces silly math. The pipeline is the truer read, and 2 under contract against 139 active listings is thin. It has been thin for three weeks now. If you own out on the Cape and you want to be closed before the fall, price is the only lever you have left to pull.

St. George Island

1 closing at $1,060,000, down from 5 sales the week before, with the under-contract count sliding from 6 to 2 and active inventory easing to 111 listings. Everything the island picked up in late July, it handed right back.

Last week this report called the island's jump the headline of the week and said to hold it loosely. Seven days later that caution looks earned. At 25.6 months of supply on the current pace, St. George Island lands right back where it spent most of the summer, which is a buyer's market with real room to negotiate. Nothing about the island changed, the sample size just got small again.

The Land Market

4 lots closed coast-wide, down from 7. Three of them were in the St. Joe Beach and Mexico Beach corridor, topping out at $500,000 and averaging $256,778. St. George Island moved the fourth at $105,000. Cape San Blas and Port St. Joe both posted zeros, and that is with 183 active parcels sitting between them.

Coast-wide, active land inventory ticked up to 393 parcels from 390, with 9 under contract. Four sales a week works out to roughly 22.7 months of lot supply. Land has been the slowest corner of this market all year and last week did nothing to change it. If you are buying a lot on the Forgotten Coast right now, you are the one setting the terms.

What the Pace Actually Means

Eleven sales a week projects to about 48 homes a month. Against 571 active listings that is 12.0 months of supply, double the 6.1 months this report posted a week ago. Both numbers came out of the same spreadsheet, and neither one is really the market.

Weekly months-of-supply bounces hard on a coast this small, because 11 sales against 22 is a difference of eleven houses. Average the last three weeks and the Forgotten Coast has been running about 17 closings a week, which puts real supply near 7.6 months. That is the figure to plan around.

Which side of that you sit on changes what you do next. Sellers, the pipeline thinned from 25 to 19 and the calendar is not your friend from here, so the houses that move before October will be the ones priced against this year's comps rather than 2023's. Buyers, you have leverage nearly everywhere on this coast right now, and the most of it out on Cape San Blas and on just about any vacant lot you care to walk.

August has one other thing going for it. The people who buy out here in the slow weeks are usually the ones who already know what they want. They have walked the beach at Salinas Park in July heat and again in a February wind, and they are not shopping a vacation. They are buying a place to come back to. Eleven of them closed last week.

This weekly report tracks residential and land activity across Port St. Joe, Cape San Blas, Mexico Beach, St. Joe Beach, and St. George Island, giving buyers and sellers a real-time read on where the Forgotten Coast real estate market stands each week.

Key Metrics Summary

Area Detail

Vacant Land Detail

If you're thinking about buying or selling this summer and want a straight read on what the data means for your situation, reach out. No pressure, just a real conversation about the market from someone who lives and works here.