In case you haven’t noticed, we have been in a strong seller’s market in many areas. So we put together a little map that shows the hot (and hotter) areas.
This map will auto-update each week and is also available on all of our clients’ sites. Enjoy!
Three years ago we wrote to be wary of tech-less tech firms. And today, we were again reminded how important this advice is.
One of our clients had recently contracted with a local web development firm to create a site for her. We often host sites for clients as courtesy and we agreed to do so this time as well.
This might be sort of “get off my lawn”-ish, but our firm has been around 10 years & our head tech guy has been writing code for 20 years. Look, we like new technology and love automation. But at some point, SOMEONE has to know how a web server works.
We strongly recommend that before you hire anyone to build a website for you, ask them a simple question: DO YOU WRITE CODE? If the answer is “uhhhh,” we humbly suggest you call someone else. And if you ever want a sanity check, feel free to call/email us. We are good at sniffing out the sharks. 🙂
Yowza, it’s been over 6 months since we’ve blogged! So much for leading by example, eh? Let’s try to make up for it with some rock-solid analysis of the Charlotte market.
Now that’s a healthy market. But how about some areas within Mecklenburg?
Okay, so Union County has seen a slight decrease from 2014, but other than that, there isn’t a shred of bad news in here!
Both Charlotte & Mecklenburg County are sitting with just over 5 months of housing inventory. That means in many areas we are in a full-blown seller’s market. There are a whole lot of subdivisions with fewer than 4 months of supply: Collins Park, Barclay Downs, Sedgefield, Merry Oaks, Elizabeth, Madison Park, and Chantilly, just to name a few.
If there are sellers in there considering selling, now is a great time. Or, so says the postcards you should be sending… 😉
It’s been quite some time since we’ve seen seller’s markets, so enjoy it! Even the areas with high inventory are typically not more than 9 or 10 months. Just a few years ago, 9 months inventory would have been considered very good.
Have a great summer and party like it’s 2005!
We have redesigned our IDX from the ground up, to be “responsive,” meaning mobile users stay on the same website rather than being redirected to a “mobile-only” search.
We went to great effort to make sure this new design continues to have all the great localized data for Charlotte, such as Neighborhood Analyzer, DealSniffer, & GoGreen!
With the 3rd quarter in the books, let’s take a look at how 2013 has looked:
Now those are some nice charts, eh? The biggest gains are in the city of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County – both are up over 10% from 2012!
Even condos aren’t doing too badly:
Overall, condos are up 8-10% from 2012 in Charlotte/Mecklenburg, and we’re seeing minimal gains in most areas other than uptown:
However, though uptown condo values are down, activity is up:
As always, feel free to steal these graphs and let us know if you have questions, or if there’s any data we can crunch for you!
If you’ve been in the business for a few years, we don’t need to tell you that we’ve gone through many years of a strong buyer’s market in most areas. But the tide seems to be turning.
As of May 1, the following popular neighborhoods in the Charlotte area have fewer than four (4) months inventory:
To put in perspective — 6 months is considered a “balanced” market, i.e. neither seller’s or buyer’s market. For most of the past 4 years or so, inventory around Charlotte was anywhere from 9-14 months or so. But suddenly, inventory is very low in a lot of areas.
What do I do with this info?
Farm, farm, farm! If there are homeowners in those areas who are even considering selling — now is a great time. Many (if not most) homeowners have no idea just how much the real estate market has changed in the past year. The agent to deliver this news may very well be the one to get the listing(s).
And don’t forget that our IDX service comes with an “Absorption widget” that you can put on any website. This allows you & your clients to see inventory stats for any neighborhood in the Charlotte metro.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 5 years, you know that the entire country has gone through a real estate downturn. Across the country, the “market peak” varied from 2005-2008 or so, and in some areas (i.e. Las Vegas, Phoenix, areas of Florida, etc), values in 2013 are still up to 40-50% lower than they were at the peak.
For the metro Charlotte area, on average, current values are around 13% lower than they were in 2007 (which, in general, was the market peak for the region). Overall, not too bad. But surprisingly, some areas are doing quite well.
Here is a chart of the value change of every neighborhood with at least 1 home sold per month. Yes, some are still struggling, but many are at or near where they were back in 2007, which is pretty remarkable given the severity of the downturn.
Neighborhoods such as The Peninsula, Cedarfield, Midwood, and Birkdale have actually surpassed their 2007 values. Others, such as Baxter Village, Chantilly, and Piper Glen are within about 5% of the peak.
Given how low inventory is right now (under 6 months in many popular areas), now is a great time to encourage homeowners in hot areas to put their homes on the market. Use our market stats plugin or the graphs available in neighborhood analyzer to create content for your blog and/or postcard campaigns. It’s been a long, long wait, but in some areas it’s actually a seller’s market!
Now that we have enough data to show a trend, this weekend, we will update all our neighborhood appreciation charts to include 2013.
In addition, we have some exiting new additions to our WordPress plugin that we will be announcing to clients.
So stay tuned!
In this day & age, buyers and sellers want information, and lots of it. And you have an MLS membership with ability to pull any sort of statistics you like. So we now have a quick & easy way for you to transform those numbers into a neat & tidy chart, like this one:
Just go here: https://www.davisfarrell.com/graph_creator.html
Input your data (up to 4 data points), and voila… a graph you can grab & use anywhere you like.
Enjoy, and happy blogging!
We’ve had a couple clients lately who have told us that a web firm they were considering hiring told them that our IDX is “incompatible” with the website they are proposing to create.
Let’s make 1 thing clear. An IDX is a property search. There are many ways to implement it, but there is no such thing as an “incompatible” IDX. So why are web firms saying this, then? Well, 2 reasons.
Here’s the problem. Real estate is, at its heart, a very local thing. No national IDX firm will offer the sort of Charlotte-specific data metrics we do. They aren’t going to take the time to figure out that Dilworth is both in Area 5 and Area 6, or that “Ballantyne” isn’t a neighborhood, but a large area of South Charlotte.
We usually don’t use this blog to pimp our products, and we obviously have a vested interest here, but right is right, and some of these web firms are just not being honest. Bottom line, any time someone tries to steer you to a particular product, ask if there is an affiliate relationship. And if your new web guy can’t/won’t integrate a product they aren’t familiar with, ask us. We’ll be glad to help.