Charleston Real Estate Blog

As I wrote in The Dirty Little Secret of Charleston Real Estate Search, you're being bought and sold as a LEAD when you search for homes on Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com and other syndicated websites. Late last year, Edina Realty, a large Midwestern brokerage announced they were no longer going to allow their listings to be displayed on ...

Happy Saturday. It's always fun to share really bad pictures that pop up in the Charleston MLS from time to time. Tilt! Does this home have structural issues or is the photo just taken on a sharp angle. Notice the bottom left of the photo where the person walking down the street is scurrying away from the home rather quickly just in ...

Based on the median sales price, the Charleston real estate market is showing the famous "double dip" in home prices. The median price is affected by the mix of homes sold and when more less expensive homes sell, the median price will decline and due to a high number of distressed sales in the Charleston area including ...

Probably the most frustrating thing for buyers searching Charleston homes for sale is finding a listing in the price range and location that they are interested in only to see that there are only a couple of pictures. The first thing that might come to mind is that something must be wrong with that house and since there are usually hundreds ...

... and why. I attended hearitdirect, an amazing conference held in Charleston yesterday featuring panels of Charleston real estate consumers who provided insights into buying, selling and their use of technology to search Charleston homes for sale. Let's focus on what they had to say about how the search process. The most ...

The Charleston MLS just changed vendors who handle showing appointments and I attended an orientation seminar yesterday. The company, ShowingTime, is headquartered in Chicago (which just happens to be my hometown) and the 3 representatives who visited Charleston were simply thrilled with not only our beautiful and historic city but our weather ...

I've said for a while now that today's Charleston house hunter doesn't really need an agent to find homes for sale that might be perfect for them. And I know several buyers who work very hard searching just about every day (and sometimes multiple times each day). And so while you might say, what do I need an agent for anyway, ...

Despite the recent new home sales reports indicating new home construction is at the lowest level in seemingly forever, new home construction in the Charleston area can be considered very much alive and well. According to the Charleston MLS, there are 448 new homes that are finished and ready to be sold and occupied (not the Occupy Wall ...

GIGO: Garbage in, Garbage out. In today's information age, we need good information. Incorrect data entry will lead to bad information and incorrect assumptions. Here's an example. I just noticed a home listed for sale in the Charleston MLS at $6.08 per square foot. Except the square footage listed for the home is not correct, ...

Despite Gordon Gekko's famous pronouncement in Wall Street that Greed is Good, when it comes to Charleston homes available for sale, less is good (and better). A look at the chart below of the last 3 years of Charleston inventory of homes for sale clearly shows that it is trending down. Now of course, there are still far too many homes for ...