LATEST MARKET INDICATORS (NOV 07)

Market Indicators for Single Family Homes (SFD)

(To view the whole article, including the supporting graphs, please click HERE)

We are still selling a considerable number of homes in the Charleston area: Sales activity is back to 2004 levels, which was not a bad year!. So why is it that all the news that you read about real estate are bad these days? My opinion is two-fold:

a) Good or encouraging news don't sell! Newspapers and media want big headlines that make the news. So they choose whether to look at the glass half-full or half-empty, according to their view of which headling will do better for their sales. Right now they are looking at a half-empty glass...

b) It is true that we have a very high level of inventory. But we are comparing today's levels with the 3 "hottest" years for real estate in recent times (04-06), where inventory was extremely low! The trends are encouraging, we are seeing a lot fewer speculative homes being built, and the inventory seems to be coming down. The real test will come in the first quarter of next year!

How does this compare with Mt. Pleasant and Belle Hall? Inventory in Mt. Pleasant did increase more dramatically than in the metro area as a whole, since it trebled from the 2004-05 level.
But the current trend is to stabilize and decrease. For the whole of Mt Pleasant, we can see sales activity regressing to 2003 levels (a little slower than the metro average), but still
selling a substantial number of homes per month.

Belle Hall sales statistics show that this market appears to be more resilient than Mt. Pleasant as a whole, but because the sample size is smaller, we can see more fluctuation, which makes it harder to identify patterns. Inventory levels in Belle Hall, although high compared to 2004-05 levels, have shown the strongest trend to decrease, compares to the whole of Mt. Pleasant and the rest of Charleston. This is certainly good news for Belle Hall owners looking to sell in 2008!