The Off-Season Myth: How Worthington Sellers Unlocked a 180% Sales Surge This Summer

Every year, as the last snowbirds head north, a familiar piece of advice circulates through Southwest Florida: take your home off the market and wait for season. Nobody buys in the summer, the thinking goes. Why leave your listing sitting there getting stale?

This summer, one Estero community put that theory to the test — and the results should make every seller in Bonita Springs and Estero reconsider.

What happened in Worthington

Between July 1 and September 30, 2026, Worthington recorded 14 closed sales. In the same window last year, it recorded 5. That is a 180% increase in closed transactions — nearly triple the activity — during the months when sellers are supposedly wasting their time.

The story gets more interesting when you look at how it happened.

Condominiums led the surge. Condo closings went from 3 in summer 2025 to 9 in summer 2026. The median condo price eased from $235,000 to $225,000 — about 4.3% — and the median price per square foot moved from $195 to $171. In plain terms: sellers priced to today's market instead of anchoring to last season's comps, and buyers responded immediately. Three times as many condos found buyers in the same 92-day window.

Single-family homes told the opposite price story. The median single-family sale rose from $565,000 to $600,000 (up 6.2%), and price per square foot climbed from $278 to $307 (up 10.4%). Sales volume edged up from 2 to 3 closings.

Villas sold at 98.3% of asking — a sign that well-priced attached product is meeting motivated, decisive buyers.

One community's summer is a small sample, and we would never claim a single neighborhood proves a market-wide rule. But Worthington's experience lines up with what we saw across the two cities it sits between.

The bigger picture: almost nobody walked away

Here is the statistic that should get every would-be seller's attention. In August and September of this year, across Estero and Bonita Springs:

• 110 homes closed
• 173 more went under contract
• Only 4 sellers left the market without selling

Read that again. Of the sellers who listed and stayed listed this summer, nearly all of them ended up at the closing table or under contract. The buyers never left. They were watching — with saved searches and alerts — waiting for homes priced to the market we actually have, not the one we remember.

The real lesson: it was never about the calendar

Worthington's summer was not luck, and it was not a rising tide lifting every boat — the broader market grew only modestly over the same period. What changed inside Worthington was seller behavior. Enough sellers priced realistically, at roughly the same time, that buyers who had been sitting on the sidelines suddenly had reasons to act.

That is the part of the "off-season myth" that gets it backwards. Summer was never short on buyers. It was short on sellers willing to meet them.

If you pulled your home off the market this year — or you are thinking about it — consider the trade Worthington's condo sellers made: a modest price adjustment of a few percent in exchange for a completed sale, months before the competition of peak season returns and every neighbor lists at once. For most of them, that trade was the win.

Thinking about selling this fall — or sooner?

Whether your home is in a bundled golf community like Worthington or anywhere else in Lee or Collier County, the math is the same: buyers are here year-round, and the sellers who price to today's market are the ones who move.

If you would like to know what your home would likely sell for right now — with real closed-sale data from your community, not a guess — reach out. I am happy to walk you through the numbers for your specific neighborhood, the same way we just walked through Worthington's.

All figures reflect closed sales recorded in the local MLS for July 1–September 30, 2025 and 2026 (Worthington) and August 1–September 30, 2026 (Estero and Bonita Springs market activity). Medians are used unless noted; small sample sizes mean individual results will vary.