Keeping It REAL - by Bettsy Tyler

 First, the tid-bits:   Highest priced home sold in August - SC County - $4.2 mil  Brand New - 5 bedrooms and 6 baths, 4300 sf with an apartment over the garage. Location - 2 blocks to West Cliff.    Least expensive home sold for $446,000 . 2 bedroom and 1 bath, 765 sf home in Boulder Creek 217 homes sold in the county in August, 179 in July, 229 in June. That doesn't tell you much, but looking at this graph tells you a lot about what is happening in the market today.     I like charts. This one shows how fast the market is moving compared to this time one year and two years ago. The number of homes selling each month are very close to the number of homes available to buy. This is definitely not a normal market and not one I’ve ever seen in my 20+ years of watching the real estate market. Just to compare - here’s how the last 17 years has looked:     The two lines have never touched like they are doing today. As ...

Some things come back in style after a while, like fashion or home décor, but the same doesn’t hold true for real estate advice. And yet, retro advice is exactly what most people get when they (understandably) go to family and friends for tips about home buying and selling.  The real estate market is not unlike the stock market – it is ever changing – and if you are looking to buy or sell, you’d better be on top of the market trends and activity, and have a good real estate agent by your side. We are currently in a fast-paced housing market, it’s important to know what tips will stand the test of time and which advice is so outdated that it’ll set you up for failure. Here are five pieces of retro real estate advice that could cost you the sale or home of your dreams.  Retro tip #1: A great open house will seal the deal. The open house has long been known as the main driver of house sales. However, a hybrid of marketing efforts is what sells a house today. Serious buyers prefer...

It’s the old supply-and-demand predicament: Home sales in the U.S. continue at a torrid pace, but the availability of listings remains limited. Buoyed by historically low mortgage rates, buyers keep shopping for homes, reducing the available inventory and sparking a rise in home prices across the country.   News website  The Atlantic  summarized the sizzling home market this way:   “Pick a housing statistic at random, and it’s probably setting an all-time record. Home prices: record high. Inventory: record low. Percentage of homes selling above asking price: record high. Average time on market: record low.”¹   Meanwhile, homebuilders are contending with an increase in material costs and a shortage of labor. These issues come amid an ongoing shortage of housing. A study commissioned by the National Association of Realtors found the U.S. is coping with a deficit of about 2 million single-family homes and about 3.5 million other housing units.²   So what can w...

  15 years can make for quite a change in real estate. Who would have thought prices would be where they are today? A steady climb over the last 10 years is quite remarkable!