This week in Charleston real estate - Charleston Homes

Let?s change things up a little on this weekly recap of what?s happening in the Charleston real estate market with a few less statistics and a little bit more commentary. March ended with 901 sales reported to the Charleston MLS as of this morning and a few more should trickle in as the stragglers finally enter the data. And while I had hopes that March would top 1000, as you can see we?ll be quite short of that but March 2012 sales were still 3 percent higher than March of last year. And we?re starting to see some prices increases as well with the median price up just over 2.5 percent year over year.

Why I had thought we might have topped 1000 is the high number of homes under contract both contingent and pending. In plain English, there are a lot. As of this morning, there are 1921 homes that are contingent and 627 homes that are pending. And there aren?t as many short sales waiting on 3rd party lender approval as you might think with just over 700 of the contingent contracts marked as short sales. So there are a lot of homes that are more than likely going to close sometime and combined that with busy buyer activity every week with large numbers of homes going under contract, the Charleston real estate market is doing very well this year.

Here?s the statistics from this week:

• 335 new listings at an average price of $413,637
• 227 homes went under contract at an average price of $317,526
• 177 homes closed at an average price of $310,267

Statistics compiled by Howard Arnoff using the Charleston MLS as the source of data, information deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

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