My New Blog

Another busy month in the Sumter County real estate market. Lots of buyers were out looking, but not necessarily buying. I am noticing that agents are more creative with their buyers’ offers. Several of my buyers had homes to sell prior to being able to close or they were still in a lease and wanted to have a home waiting for them when the lease was over. There are legal ways to handle these situations so make sure your Realtor is knowledgeable in how to help you the buyer or the seller.

The number of units sold in September was almost the same from August 2008 (86 vs.87). We are still seeing buyer activity in the area, but I think many buyers are taking a wait and see attitude with the economy and the elections.

As for the number of listings, Sumter County saw a slight increase from 151 in August to 161 in September. I am not sure this is a true number as we have seen many Realtors changing brokerages and reentering their listings. October will continue to be effected by many of these agent changes to different brokerages. I don’t expect to see true numbers until after the agent changes have settled down.

Overall Sumter County has had 829 units closed during 2008. This has put us below the 2004 sales levels, but as far as general trends we continue to follow prior years as you can see in the year to date chart below. This week I attended a meeting about the services AgentOwned Realty offers and the General Manager for Residential Mortgage of SC was speaking about how the mortgage market has changed in the last 13 months. If you look at the chart for the Year To Date sales you can see the number of units closed started to fall off in August 2007.

I expect the remainder of 2008 to remain slow due to the holidays coming up and also the elections. I am not ready to make any predictions about 2009 with all the fluctuations we are seeing on Wall Street and in the financial markets around the world. I do know that the changes that have all ready been made will take months to impact the markets. I just hope we see the changes sooner rather than later.

Copyright®, October 2008, Kim Peasley-Parker.