Summerville and Lowcountry Real Estate Market Update

It's a great window of opportunity to sell your home right now.  Buying activity is incredible.  Almost every week of 2012 has seen over 200 properties go under contract.  This past week it was 251.

That is awesome because that only happened 4 times in 2008, zero times in 2009, 9 times in 2010, and 19 times in 2011.  And most of those were in the spring and summer.

For sellers, almost 40% of what's going under contract right now is either a short sale or a foreclosure.

Another 27% of what's going under contract is new construction.  That means that almost 67% of what's going under contract are non-traditional sales.

We've all lost about 30% in value since the peak of the market in 2006.

While inventory is down to only 6,428 active listings, which is certainly better than the 10,000 that we've had for sale, we still have too many homes for sale.

We've only been able to sell between 8,000 and 9,000 homes over the last 4 years.  Since a healthy, balanced market is only 6 months of inventory, we should only have 4,500 homes on the market.

Prices are currently back to 2002 - 2003 levels. 

The reason that inventory has dropped so much is not because of demand.  It's because many sellers gave up.  This is not a good reason.

This has created a lot of pent up supply of homes that is not currently on the market.   Any hint at price improvement will be met by an onslaught of new listing inventory, which will squash any price recovery.  Therefore, sellers need to be serious and compelling with price.

Homes that actually sell average about 95% of their final LIST price.  What this really means is that buyers don't put offers on homes until they are within 5% of what they're willing to pay for them.

For buyers, a 1% change in interest rate will produce a 10% change in your purchasing power.  It's good to note,  although the Federal Reserve Chair Bernake has pledged to keep the key note rate down, this does not necessarily correlate with where mortgage interest rates are headed. 

While prices are down, and interest rates are down, it's a great time to buy.