Charleston home buyers are busy, are the sellers ready
As the calendar rolls into the New Year, I'm noticing a dramatic increase in buyer activity on my website. The Charleston home buyers are busy with home searches once again now that Xmas searches for Nintendo Wii are over. Are the sellers ready?
There were a half dozen potential home buyers who registered yesterday for new listing alerts on my website, buyers who plan to move to the Charleston area sometime during this year. Now here's what's interesting. When I set up a search, the Charleston MLS lets me know how many homes are available. Depending on the criteria that the buyer establishes, in most cases, there were hundreds of available homes (and in one case more than a thousand) to choose from if they were ready to start house hunting today. If you are selling your home in Charleston, is your home ready to be selected by these buyers or will they choose to look at your neighbor's home instead?
Take a look at these statistics. There were approximately (final figures not yet available) 12,000 single family homes and condos sold in the greater Charleston South Carolina real estate market during 2007. The average sales price was $303,000 and the median sales price was $210,000. Currently available inventory indicates over 9000 active listings at an average list price of $519,000 and a median list price of $289,000. It appears that the prices set by sellers is much higher than what is selling.
Because the luxury home market might distort the statistics somewhat, if we focus only on homes selling for $600,000 and less, it reduces the 2007 unit sales to 11,000 homes and condos at an average sales price of $228,000 and a median sales price of $200,000. The number of active listings however indicates over 7000 available homes and condos with an average list price of $264,000 and a median list price of $229,000. The prices being set by sellers is still much higher than what buyers are buying.
So the bottom line is that the average list price is $36,000 higher than the average sales price and the average median price is $29,000 higher than the median sales price. With hundreds or thousands of homes competing for the attention of interested buyers, clearly something has to give and that something can only be price. Let's face it, a buyer wants to buy the most house for the least money and in today's Charleston real estate market, they can.
If you really want to sell your home, don't overprice your house so that your for sale sign won't collect cobwebs while a potential buyer selects another house down the street.