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Seller’s Market in Charleston, SC?

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By most accounts Charleston, South Carolina has been the one glimmer of hope throughout the country in the housing sector. We have been on top of the housing recovery almost from the start. If you live here then you are not surprised by this. The area’s most populous county accounted for 502 homes sold, 57 percent of all homes that changed hands last month within the three counties, according to the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors’ monthly home sales report released Wednesday. SEE LATEST CHARLESTON, SC MARKET STATS.Charleston, SC home sales are on the rise —->Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties combined for 876 sales in September, 13 percent more than the same month a year ago.

Seller’s Market in Charleston

The association’s monthly reports have been showing encouraging residential real estate trends since the fall of 2011. Sales have been rising, inventories have been falling and the uptick in median sales price suggests that broader real estate values are starting to rise.The Charleston area sold 7,879 homes through September, a nearly 11 percent increase compared to the same period a year ago. The median sale price also has risen to $190,000, up from $179,850 a year ago, according to the association.Charleston County also is leading the charge in slimming the average number of days a property sits on the market before being sold, bringing it to some of the shortest spans since before the last recession. All three counties averaged house listings before sold in 100 days or less on average. In Charleston the average was 87 days.Charleston SC home builders even have reason to be excited as  national new homes at an annual rate of 750,000, up 29.1% compared with a year earlier. They applied to build another 803,000 new homes on an annual basis, a 24.5% jump compared with August 2011.Home builders have become increasingly bullish — a confidence index from the National Association of Home Builders reached its highest level since June 2006. 
Excerpts by the Post and Courier used:

Home Sales Increasing Charleston, South Carolina – Real Estate Market Better

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Existing-home sales kept up their recovery in July, rising 2.3% as prices jumped 9.4% from a year ago, according to the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors, but the market’s progress disappointed analysts who expected more.Smaller inventories of homes for sale let sellers push prices higher, the association said. The average price of a new home rose 9.4% to $187,300, aided by a shift in the mix of homes sold, with fewer low-end units included. “I am seeing multiple offers within in first week a nice home comes on market,” Isle of Palms Realtor, James Schiller.Nationally, the number of homes sold rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.47 million. The numbers missed economists’ expectations of about 4.52 million home sales, according to Drew Matus, an economist at investment bank UBS.“Mortgage interest rates have been at record lows this year while rents have been rising at faster rates,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement. “Combined, these factors are helping to unleash a pent-up demand. However, the market is constrained by unnecessarily tight lending standards and shrinking inventory supplies, so housing could easily be much stronger without these abnormal frictions.”Independent economists are looking for the housing market to begin slowly reversing its more than 30% slide in prices, though most do not expect substantive price gains until at least 2013 or 2014.“It was a little below expectations but still good,” said Mike Zoller, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. He said the sharp gains in prices reflect the smaller percentage of foreclosure-related distress sales included in the numbers, as well as the shift to more higher-end home sales.
Tight credit or worries about jobs may be prompting buyers to stay on the sidelines, said Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight. The gain in home sales was the second-smallest reported this year, he added. As long as the buyer has good credit, money to put down, and good job security getting a loan is still easy by most standards.
“These are not great numbers,” Newport said. “We have record-low mortgage rates. Something is going on.”The economists also disputed the Realtor association’s argument that sales might be stronger if more homes were available.Nationally, inventories of available homes work out to about six months’ worth of expected sales, Zoller said, a level he called “reasonable.” The proportion of homes that are vacant is still above 2%, Newport said, citing Census data. That’s higher than a historical norm of about 1.7%, he said.The bright side is that the overhang of foreclosures are finally seeing a decline, relieving an overflow that pushed prices lower, Barclays economist Michael Gapen wrote in a note to clients. About 24% of sales were foreclosure-related, down from 29% last July, he said.
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