Congratulations, Pasco County home sellers: You're the most realistic when it comes to pricing your hard-to-sell suburb-o-boxes.

Hillsborough County home sellers? Sorry. You're still a bit out of touch with the spending habits of the buying public.

As for Pinellas County home sellers, you ask a premium for your real estate, but the market seems to support higher prices in St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Tarpon Springs.

I'm calling it the Tampa Bay Home Seller Reality Index.

To gauge a seller's sense of reality, let's compare asking prices of conventionally sold homes with those of preforeclosure short sales.

The first category of seller can charge what he wants for his home. The latter category of seller has fallen behind on mortgage payments and is dumping at a discount with the bank's consent.

The larger the pricing gap between conventional sales and short sales, the more unrealistic the home selling pool. After all, these homes generally compete with one another on the market.

What do the numbers show? According to figures culled from the Multiple Listing Service by Tampa's Home Encounter, Hillsborough sellers are the most unrealistic.

Conventional sellers in August asked $108 per square foot for their Hillsborough homes. Short sales in Hillsborough listed for an average of $84 per square foot.

Consequently, Hillsborough had the smallest percentage of conventional sales among Tampa Bay counties, and short sales sold for only 77 percent of the price of conventional homes.

In Pasco, conventional sellers asked $86 per square foot. Short sellers asked $84. Not surprisingly, there was scant difference in the ultimate sales price between conventional and short sale. Widespread foreclosures have forced Pasco's conventional sellers to discount.

Pinellas offers a bit of a twist. Conventional sellers asked $141 per square foot, reflecting the county's waterfront premium. Short sellers listed their homes for $129 per square foot on average. Short sale homes sold for about 90 percent of conventionally sold homes.

Based on the numbers, Hillsborough's been the most "unrealistic" this year. A glance at the listings suggests that hundreds of conventional sellers, particular those in pricey tree-shrouded pockets of South Tampa and Carrollwood, are under little financial duress. They can afford to stick to their price.

But foreclosures - and thus short sales - are clustered in other parts of the county like Riverview and East Tampa. Those homes are usually priced to sell faster. The gap between short sale and conventional pricing probably reflects the differing sales strategies of those largely separate submarkets.

As for Pasco, the truth is that its suburban core, being recently developed, offers less distinctive real estate. If homes are largely interchangeable, you can't afford to cling to high asking prices. Buyers will seek out same model priced more cheaply down the street.

The sellers who scored the worst on the reality index are gambling that stubbornness today will pay off in profits tomorrow. Let's hope they're right. As surely as rising tides raise all boats, nasty shoals can sink all ships.

James Thorner can be reached at jthorner@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3313.