Myrtle Beach area home sales pick up in October

Single-family home sales along the Grand Strand jumped in October thanks to low interest rates, an increase in new homes being built and a shift in buying habits.

Single-family home sales jumped 16 percent in October when compared to the same month last year, according to the Multiple Listing Service. Some potential buyers who had been eyeing condo purchases have recently changed their minds after finding out that they could get a house for nearly the same price, said Radha Herring, broker-in-charge of the Watermark Real Estate Group. Some buyers her company has worked with opted to buy a house instead of a condo, a trend that wasn’t around last year and could be contributing to the pick up in single-family home sales, she said.

The continually dropping prices and lower or non-existent homeowners association fees for single-family homes are also selling points, Herring said.

“It’s such an opportunistic market for buyers,” she said.

Lower home prices and lower interest rates are also helping boost home sales, said Greg Sisson, the vice president of the Hoffman Homes division of The Hoffman Group. Interest rates have plunged to record lows under 4 percent this fall, and are at 4.02 percent on a 30-year fixed loan.

The median price - the price at which half sold for more and half sold for less - of a single family home was $165,000 in October, down 5 percent from the same month last year, according to the MLS.

New home sales picked up in October as some buyers are choosing to buy low-priced lots and build a new home when they don’t find exactly what they want in an existing property, Sisson said.

“For October in a very uncertain second-home market, it was a good month,” he said, but added that next year will likely be a similar crawl towards a recovery in the real estate market.

Some government interventions have slowed the process of returning to a healthier market, said Blake Sloan, the owner of the Sloan Realty Group. In May, the foreclosure process was slowed by a state Supreme Court order that required lenders to make sure homeowners weren’t wrongfully foreclosed on. Some properties listed for sale were pulled of the market and checked, he said.

“It put a little more inventory of distressed properties in the pipeline in October,” Sloan said, adding that that boost in typically lower-priced distressed properties may have contributed to the uptick in single-family home sold.

There are still other distressed properties that banks haven’t put on the market, often referred to as shadow inventory, which results in a lack of urgency among buyers, he said. Buyers right now are more educated than they used to be and are buying if there is an especially good deal but otherwise they are waiting knowing more properties will come up for sale, Sloan said.

While single-family home sales jumped, condo sales dropped 8 percent in October, when compared to the same month last year, according to the MLS.

A drop in condo inventory and some challenges in financing condo purchases - especially in properties where the homeowners association is facing obstacles such as unpaid dues - may be part of the reason condo sales dropped, Sloan said.

Condo sales may also have dropped in part because investors picked through most of the good properties earlier in the year and have slowed their buying, said Mark Dayvault, the sales manager at Century 21 Thomas.

With more foreclosures on the sidelines, more condos will likely come up for sale, which will continue to depress prices, he said.

“We’ve still got to get through the foreclosure inventory and the short sales,” Dayvault said. “Until we get that inventory out of the marketplace prices will remain where they’re at.”

Prices continued on a downward trend in October, according to the MLS.

The median price of a condo was $107,000 in October, down 8 percent from the same month last year, according to the MLS.

“It is all still driven by the distressed side of [the market], which makes it so hard to predict because it’s a very volatile market, said Tom Maeser, a real estate analyst with the Coastal Carolinas Association of Realtors.