MLS Market Reports

Folks, this is a blog I wrote a while back and forgot to post.  I figured I would go ahead and post it in case someone was interested in a respective view of the first half of 2011.  Here we go...

We are five months into the 2011 real estate year, and there are some encourage signs, although I would be cautious before making any plans to do any house flipping just yet.

Real estate professionals and market observers have long maintained that the heavy inventory of foreclosure homes and short sales needs to be thinned before a recovery can begin.

And there is some encouraging news regarding the Beaufort market in the statistics through May 31.

There have been 421 home sales recorded through the Beaufort MLS. The median sales price is $175,000, which

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If you are a Realtor, you get asked a lot about what price-range homes are moving. Whether you are in the lock room at the gym, or at a local eatery, everybody wants the skinny on the Beaufort real estate market.

Let me answer this question two ways. From a personal standpoint, it has been foreclosure and short sale city.

I just closed on a house in Shell Point a few days ago, for $116,000. It was a foreclosure. I am working with four other buyers who currently have homes under contract. Three are under $140,000, and one is a new home for $230,000. Aside from the new home, in the terrific new neighborhood of Somerset Point on Lady's Island, all of my pending contracts and recent sales are either short sales or foreclosures.

Foreclosures and short sales…

It's fitting that we take a moment to look back on this past month on Halloween, because it has been a creepy month for Realtors, with a mere 52 homes going under contract so far in October.

Before we go any further, this is not a gloom and doom post. All things considered, there are some encouraging signs to be found in Beaufort's real estate market.

There are several communities that have had real success in the area which ha e had great success selling new homes at the new price point. Liberty Point in Shell Point, which recently broke ground on its new homes, has placed five homes under contract in the past few months, in the $80 to $115 per square foot price point.

Somerset Point on Lady's Island has seen 17 homes go under contract this year, in the $98…

Beaufort, SC, and the surrounding area has a varied, bustling, and exciting real estate market, from the oceanfront mansions of Harbor Island and Fripp Island, to 200-plus year old homes in downtown Beaufort's "Old Point" neighborhood.

But, for many Beaufort Realtors and real estate observers, the backbone of Beaufort's real estate market are the five "main areas," which are comprised of Beaufort, Mossy Oaks, Port Royal, Burton, and Lady's Island.

These five areas create the geographic heart of Beaufort's real estate market, which sits between the farther flung real estate areas of Fripp Island and Harbor Island to the east, Northern Beaufort County to the west, and South of the Broad River to the south.

Beaufort's five main areas represented about half of…

The Beaufort, SC real estate market saw a pair of notable trends in 2010 -- prices continued to decline, but the number of transactions spiked up dramatically, as investors and cash buyers began to re-emerge.

The medan asking price for homes sold via the Beaufort Multiple Listing Service (MLS) dipped to $174,000, it's lowest point in years, according to Beaufort MLS figures. However, the number of transactions jumped from 791 homes in 2009, to 971 in 2010.

The manner in which buyers are purchasing homes in Beaufort continues to change. Cash sales represented a whopping 28 percent of the home transactions in the Beaufort MLS.

This is more than double the 12.5 percent of cash buyers participating in the 2008 Beaufort MLS real estate market. In 2007, cash

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Today I wanted to post the Beaufort Country Association of Realtors Housing Report for August 2011.  As always great facts and very detailed information.  Simply click here to see the full report with great write-ups and graphs.

Because I have so many clients ask are past market statistics, here we are going to give a retrospective view on October 2010 vs 2009.  Here goes the wayback real estate machine.

Opportunities continue to abound for buyers interested in the Beaufort, SC real estate market, but October saw many of these buyers refuse to get off the fence.

Despite the continuing combination of low interest rates, and a very high affordability index in the Beaufort area, October was a month of frustration for many involved with the Beaufort, SC, real estate market. Compared with sales figures from October 2009, sales and pending contracts were down in October 2010, according to statistics provided by the Beaufort County Association of Realtors (BCAR).

The Beaufort

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Today we will take a comparative look at single family properties sold in Beaufort for the month of October 2009 and 2008. This will be a tough blog for me becuase, to be honest, there isn't a whole lot to take from comparing the past two Octobers. Even so let's take a look. I'm posting these numbers for those who don't have access. Total completed sales are very close with 66 this year compared an almost identical 64 closings last year. While these seem to represent parallel conditions, there was something I noticed.

Looking a bit deeper into the numbers, I did find a change that bodes well for buyers. Take notice of the difference in average list price vs. sold price for the two years. It seems that sellers are coming to grips with how bad the real

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With the the fist six months of 2009 behind us, I thought it was a good time to compare this year's home sales to 2008 sales in the same period.  As most of us know, 2008 was considered to be one of the worst real estate years on record.  So how does 2009 stack up?  Unfortunately, 2009 numbers paint a not-so-pretty picture.  While the most obvious numbers are down, I believe there are some positive signs.

In 2009, total residential closings are down 20% from 2008.  Last there were 447 sold from January through June compared to just 355 in 2008.  Even Beaufort's best selling community in 2008, Dataw Island, is down from 16 to 6 sales (though 6 are currently pending).  But not all is as bad as as the data indicates.  One statistic I found positive was that

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Today I thought we could take a look at the 2009 Dataw Island housing market.  This subdivision is the most popular retirement community in the Beaufort area.  I looked at this area because while the remainder of Beaufort Country was hit very hard in 2008 by the real estate slump, Dataw bucked that trend.  In 2008, no community in the local MLS witnessed more closings than Dataw Island.  The island saw 34 houses change hands which was extraordinary considering the state of our market.  What's even more impressive is that twelve of the fore mentioned transactions were above $500,000.  I am certainly not saying sales were not down from the glory years of 2005 and 2006.  What I am saying is while affected, this neighborhood hasn't seen the decline that

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