Homes For Sale In Mt Pleasant SC: How’s The Market? (Pt 4)

Homes For Sale In Mt Pleasant SC: Where Are We Heading?

In this post I want to look at projections on real estate appreciation to help answer the common question “How’s the market?” Most agents can answer that question with the standard “Now is a great time to buy!”, whether they believe that or not.

It seems that response is drilled into you as an agent to the point that it is like a reflex. It is a basic skill all good agents possess–the ability to see the glass as half full whether it is or not. Just look at the descriptions of listings–rather than say a home “needs updating”, it instead “is ready for the new owner to put their own stamp on it”.

But that is another topic. The main point here is that agents can respond to that age old question with the standard “Now is a great time to buy!” and in fact, that may be absolutely true at that point in time. And the agent may really believe that to be true, whether it is or not. But, here is my main point before I got off topic–does the agent know why it is a good time?

The point of this series of posts is to help educate buyers and sellers of homes for sale Mt Pleasant SC as to what is going on in the real estate market-both locally and nationally. The media doesn’t always do a good job reporting the real facts–sensational headlines are what grab attention, and the facts can sometimes be secondary.

Even with the facts it can be difficult to understand them, so my hope is to try and better explain them so that the average person can better understand current market conditions. Once you have a better understanding, then you can make not only an educated decision, you can make the decision you feel is best for you. While it may be a great time to buy right now, it may not be a great time to buy for you.

Today I am going to look at the recent Home Price Expectation Survey. This quarterly survey polls over one hundred leading economists, real estate experts and investment & market strategists to get a consensus on where they project home values to be heading over the next few years.

This number is the average of all the projections for the coming years. One thing to note is the historical average for real estate has been around 3.6%.

 

Here is a look at the Cumulative Appreciation through 2018–a break down of the varying responses of the most optimistic projections (the “bulls”) to the most negative projections (the “bears”) to show the range of opinions that lead to the average.

Even the most conservative projections average out to a 9.4% increase in property values through 2018. The survey shows that we could likely duplicate the appreciation pace we saw prior to the bubble, which makes sense when you look at the first graph.

 

The final graph shows the average annual appreciation rate broken down to leading up to the real estate bubble, during the bubble, after the bubble burst and since then.

It shows that we have made a nice recovery, and are currently on a faster pace than the historical average. But based on the projections, we should see that pace scaling back and falling into a more normal pace.

Of course, no one has a crystal ball, but keep in mind this survey asks some of the leading economists in the nation for their expert opinion, so this should be a little more credible than some other stuff you might find courtesy of the mass media.

Stay tuned to my blog for more real estate information about the market in general, as well as Charleston SC real estate and homes for sale in Mt Pleasant SC. Be sure to check out my website for all your real estate needs.