November through February are traditionally very slow real estate months. Between the holidays, the cold weather, and the upcom-ing tax season, there is typically just not a lot of buyer activity. It’s normally served as a time for me to check off a long list of tasks that have been stacking up on my to-do list throughout the year, but I can tell you that I haven’t had time to glance at the list this winter. Buyer activity is at levels not seen since before the downturn in the market nearly a decade ago and if it’s like this in the winter, I can only say “hold on” when spring and summer arrive!
The passing of another year gives us a great time to look back at the past decade of sold property data for the McClellanville and Awendaw area. In the chart to the left, we can see that 2014 brought us nearly back up to the number of sales that we saw before the downturn in the real estate market. Interestingly, today more of those sales are coming from homes than they were a decade ago. I attribute this to two fac- tors. First, there was an undeniable rally on land going on at the time and financing of land much more plentiful. The second factor is that a much higher percentage of homes were foreclosed and sold for cheap than land over the past few years. With those foreclosures mostly drying up and lending on land loosening up, we are starting to see more land buyers to even out these numbers a bit.
Breaking that same data down a bit further into the McClellanville and Awendaw regions a few more patterns also begin to emerge. First and most important, you can see that the number of properties sold in all 4 sectors are on an increase, but Awendaw homes which once represented the lowest number of sales now accounts for the highest. A pattern that we are certainly observing in our office is an increase in the number of buyers coming from Charleston and Mt. Pleasant. It’s not a number I track, but I would say 5+ years ago, prospective buyers from Mt. Pleasant may have made up a whopping 5% of our client pool, recently however, that number has climbed to 15 or 20%. The reason we are hearing time after time is that they want to get out of the city. Too much traffic, too much noise, and not enough breathing room. As most of these buyers still work in the Metro area, Awendaw offers shorter drive which most find attractive and is therefore feeling the brunt of this wave. You can see on the graph that Awendaw land sales are also not far behind as a result of this same trend. Mc- Clellanville homes displays the most stable timeline of them all, which certainly dipped and is rising again, but it goes to prove one of my favorite sayings: “Nobody HAS to move to McClellanville, BUT there are a whole lot of people that WANT to move here”. What I mean by this is that McClellanville offers no Boeing manufacturing plant or booming job surplus, but it offers a simple attractive life that many say they are unable to find anywhere else in the world.
MCVL Realty proved to continue to gain a larger share of the market in 2014 and we are proud to say that we ended the year as the #1 real estate office in terms of sales volume in McClellanville and Awendaw. This is quite a feat for a two-person office, but our two agents finished the year neck and neck in the top two positions for individual agents in the area as well.
Furthermore, MCVL Realty represented one third of those buying and selling properties valued over $200,000 and 5 of the 6 sides buying and selling waterfront in McClellanville. We started 2015 off with the first two sales of the area and also lead all offices in the number of listings in the area and sales volume for McClellanville. We are continually thankful for the support of our community and the trust of our clients.
