Market Update for 1st Quarter 2021

Hey guys, it's Buddy Blake here with eXp Realty here in Wilmington, North Carolina. Hope you guys are doing well, hope you had a great Easter weekend and holy week right before it. It was absolutely beautiful here in our area. And the weather's going to be great here, we're going to be up close to 80 degrees most of this week, sunshine. So it is finally springtime, and pollen is just crushing me. Anyway, I want to go over some stuff real quick that we went over with our team today. We kind of do our first week of the month we go through our recap of what's going on in the market. So I'm going to bounce over here and work through this. Let me just kind of move this over here a little bit. So let me go through real quick. Let's see. Let me get over here to our closings.

First off mortgage update. Mortgages continue to have stabilized somewhat, we're seeing around the three, three, and a quarter, in many cases. Of course, you have to check with your credit and your lender, but we highly recommend Paul here in our office. If you haven't refinanced in the last year, or you're thinking about purchasing something, you definitely want to reach out to Paul. He has got some really great rates, some great investors that he works through. Even the whole second home or investment property rates, he's got a couple of investors that are not hitting it the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are. So you don't have to get penalized the way you would go through some of the more larger banks or lenders.

So I'm going to work, do our market update. This is interesting. This is the US inventory levels back in January of last year. They were down, they rose, this was when the whole world was falling apart last spring if you remember, and now we're down to nationwide less than two months supply of inventory, which is really crazy. And this just talks about what's going on. One of the biggest problems that we're having with homes hitting the market nationwide is sellers, they want to sell and take advantage of the demand and they get low-interest rates and things like that, but they don't know where to go. I'll tell you in our area if you've got a property, we've got some really good plans to help you with that, where we're able to actually get you a house to move to and sell yours. And also in many cases, we're able to get you one, two, three, or even six months where you can stay in your house after it actually closes. So that really puts you in a wonderful position. And as a seller, these opportunities don't exist in normal market conditions. So you are able to command, not just a high price, but even more favorable terms for yourself.

But what I want to get into, is Hanover County, it's the smallest county in North Carolina but it's our coastal Wilmington County. You can see right here that in April, we have seen it drop down, days on market were down to around seven days on average on market, and that's all price ranges. You can see that it comes down because inventory has tightened up and our average price, or at least medium price I should say, is up over 340. That's about a $100,000 increase over the last two years. And then here, if you want it by the price you can really zoom down into, and you can see the red here that means we've got less than two months of inventory all the way up to 1.2 million and all in Hanover County, which is a few hundred thousand people or 300,000 or so homes, we've got less than under 200,000, there are only 14 houses available and that's all conditions, just know that. So if you're struggling to find something 200 or under, this is the reason why. And even with that, all of Hanover County, there are only 287 homes available. And that makes it all the way up, even over $3 million. So there are only 287 homes, 506 are under contract. So you can see the situation that we've got going on.

Real quick, Pender County, which is the Hampstead area, tops with beaches, those areas inventory is also falling. They're around two weeks supply of inventory across all price ranges, price levels have increased there also. And you can see the price ranges here all the way up, you got less than one month supply up to 500,000 in Pender County.

Brunswick County, which is the largest county in all of North Carolina, it's a huge swath of land. You can see that inventory has dropped here too, to just over two weeks of inventory and house prices have dipped a little bit there from what they were. But then I want to zoom in on the price range, again, you can see Brunswick County, there are only 500 homes available in all of Brunswick County.

Then we take a look at a little bit more details, like Wilmington address, there are only 245 homes available month over month, we're down almost 8%. And our month over month price has increased the median up almost 9%. So in Wilmington with an address, you can see we're approaching the half-a-million dollar mark. I think we've crossed paradigms that we're just not going to go back on even when things do shift, which they will at some point. And here you can see the price ranges. Here are the 242 homes available. And again, if you want these, down below is a link, you can look at these in a more detailed approach here.

You can see Hampstead, which continues to be one of the hottest areas right now. They only have 46 homes available, this keeps dropping. But what I wanted to do is I want to get down here to here's Leland, for instance, I want to get to Carolina Beach. I've always told people, this is the tip of the spear. I keep saying it, this is eight weeks in a row. The inventory has been rising in Carolina Beach. Now, this can be one of two things. It could mean that the shift is closer than a lot of us think because this is the first area that came out of the doldrums and it's also the first area over the last two cycles that went into it and this has just always been kind of my watchpoint. But what, when you may also have is, just because the prices have been increasing dramatically and we may be getting into a situation where the prices that sellers are starting to just push up so high that they're hitting the Wrightsville Beach price, the lower price point in some cases, so they may be just kind of pushing a little bit too hard and that can slow things down, but we'll see, we're just now beginning to get into our spring market.

So I don't know what this means yet, but I do know that it's the area that inventory has been rising in. But now we'll tell you this, we just put a property on the market over the weekend there, hadn't been able to show it yet cause it's rented and we've already had several offers on it and it's going to go significantly above likely asking price. So it is just crazy what's going on when you get something that's a really unique property, which this one is.

Anyway, links are below for the newest listings in our area. We also have some listings we're bringing online in the next week or two, some properties. So stay in touch with our agents so we can make sure you know about those. Make sure you get out and get your pre-approval done with your lender and make sure that if you're doing a VA or FHA loan, have a conversation with your agent and your lender about getting approved conventionally because we're starting to see some properties hit the market that is not being offered with financing terms of VA or FHA or USDA because of appraisal delays and appraisal issues that we're running into and they just simply don't offer a lot of flexibility. So some sellers are not considering some of those types of loan products because of the time lag and the delays.

Anyhow, give me a call, shoot me an email if you've got questions. I knew it just threw a lot of blame throw at you, but it's going to be a really fast-paced market, pretty much all around the country and certainly in the coastal areas. If we can help you in any way let me know. If you're thinking about getting into real estate, we need more agents on our team, we'd love to help you with that. Whether you're a seasoned agent, we'd love to have you on our team or learn more about eXp. But even if you're just getting into real estate school, we have opportunities where you can actually get paid while you learn the business and you train. So we need some folks because we are overwhelmed with buyers right now and we want to serve them all well so we need some more folks to help us with that, and it's a great time to get into the business because you can learn it quickly, really rapidly. So anyhow, thanks a lot. Have a great week. If you have any questions, give me a call. Bye-bye.