Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Selling Greenville your favorite real estate podcast here in Greenville South Carolina I'm your host as always Stan McCune Realtor right here in Greenville and you can find all of my contact information in the show notes if you need to reach out to me for any of your real estate needs and just a reminder if you haven't already done this please like the show if you're on YouTube very simple you just scroll down there's a little thumbs up button hit that please hit the little bell to subscribe or it might say the word subscribe or whatever podcast app you're using same thing if you can leave a rating or review that would be fantastic as well that's all I ask of you guys so please just take one quick little second to do that and that'll put a little smile on my face if you're watching on YouTube you'll notice something's changed and that is my glasses yes I finally decided it was time to go in a little bit different direction with my glasses a little bit rounder a little bit darker in terms of the frame and I like it you might not and I don't care because I do and this is this is what I do for myself but I've gotten good feedback so far so hopefully you do like it because that would be preferable over you not liking it but take a look on YouTube and actually this is a great episode to watch on YouTube because we're going to be talking about the market stats for the month of March I'm gonna adjust my microphone here a little bit market stats for the month of March and I just want to preface it in this way the data right now is noisy and there's a reason a very simple reason why the data is noisy in my opinion and that's because the world is noisy right we've got all these crazy things going on right now and these things affect the real estate market in specifically in Greenville right there Greenville you know it it's not like you know there are there are certain markets like for instance the North Jersey market right I if you don't know I'm from North Jersey I still have connections over there I've not lived there since high school but I still have high school friends that that live up there so I'm still tethered up there I know real realtors up there it's a hot market and it doesn't matter what happens politically it's gonna remain a hot market why because there's people moving from New York City or that are getting jobs in New York City that they need a home and it's just too expensive for most people to live in New York and so they go to North Jersey like that's very it's very simple very straightforward they're not gonna be affected by what's happening you know in the Middle East or what's happening in the bond market or what's happening you know elsewhere it's just different Greenville more sensitive and so we're seeing a lot of a lot of UPS and downs a lot of peaks and valleys a lot of things that are you know from one month to the next might be like okay this looks like a seller's market hold on now it looks like a buyer's market now it's going back and forth and it's really hard to plant our flag and say this is the type of market that it is you know I've said for a long time it feels like it's going this way it feels like it's going that way but ultimately it is a nobody market nobody's happy buyers aren't happy sellers aren't happy but the reality of the situation is that we still need to look at the data and see exactly what is happening because there's still some really helpful stuff or and important stuff to look at in the data so I'm gonna pull up the Greater Greenville Association of realtors monthly indicators as they're called now and we're gonna start right at the top with new listings now this has been an interesting thing to track because you know if you're looking on YouTube you can see new listings kind of steadily were going up and then Covid happened they dropped a little bit peaked in 22 went back down and then we this is where we've started to see some crazy swings they went like way low at in the winter this is the month of December 23 and 24 they went way low like the lowest since pre covid and then they made a a big correction bounce back up and then last year they made a really big correction so we had huge year over year new listing numbers last year and we've continued to be in the positive year over year with new listings we're having more homes coming on the market now than we did a year ago but the percent increase has slowed because we're going up against a higher baseline right so whereas we were you know last year in 2025 we were competing with the abysmal 2024 numbers now in 2026 we're obviously competing against 2025 which was a heavy new listings year like 2025 by far had the most new listings that we've ever seen in one year in Greenville and now that we're in 2026 we're still seeing positive year over year growth but the percent increase is not as much so parched had 28 new listings that's a record we've never had that many new listings in one month ever in Greenville that was a 7.8% only 7.8% like you would think wow the most new listings ever it's got to be a huge increase year over year no because in March of 25 it was 2,598 new listings so it was only two hundred and two more new listings year over year so that's a 7.8% increase this is a good thing right we want what I've been preaching over and over and over again for years now we want more new listings we need more inventory that's what the market is looking for pending sales this this is an interesting one right here because pending sales have been a little softish to start the year January we were down 2.9% year over year in pending sales February we were up but only point five % so not even a full percentage point year over year March though we skyrocketed market really took off in the month of March I felt that a lot of people felt that and we had a 13% increase and I mean by far if you're if you're on YouTube and you're looking at this like the March dot and the dot plot is way higher than any month going back all the way to 2008 which is insane to think about 13% year over year increase 1,942 pending sales almost 2,000 we nearly crested for the first time 2,000 not quite there yet but we still have a chance to get there because very often April or may ends up being the highest pending sale month of the year so this is going to be fascinating to track to see will we will we will we get above 2,000 for a month this year we've got you know the month of April here that we're in the middle of right now so we obviously don't have the data yet for April and then we've got the month of may coming up very interesting but that compares to 1,718 so we had over 200 more pending sales year over year a 13% increase huge increase that wiped away whatever concerns that I had that I've expressed the past couple of months and in the pending sales data March just completely wiped all of that away obviously made up more than made up for you know what we've been lacking the past couple of months close sales on the other hand we're down 1.1% year over year this is now the third straight month closed sales have had a negative year over year print so they went down to 1,552 in contrast with 1,570 in March 25 this is a result of the pending sales data being soft for the past couple of months right because a pending sale is what turns into a closed sale so the fact that we have a record pending sales month for the month of March means that the closed sales for the month of April perhaps may should be pretty strong and you know April of 2025 had 1,542 closed sales I would expect that probably once it's all said and done once we get the April stats in next month we'll probably be in the 16 to 17 range for close sales so we should easily surpass April numbers may last year was really strong though in terms of close sales I'm not sure if we'll if we'll beat that but that will be interesting so but importantly three straight months that we've had a decrease in closed sales you know it's been a long time since we've had three straight months of year over year decreases in in closed sales so we'll have to this is something we have to really keep track of right cause this is kind of a textbook contracting market right now right it doesn't matter how many homes go under contract it only matters how many of those contracts get to closing at the end of the day and so far that market has contracted all year I don't think that's gonna happen for the month of April but if it if we just have one kind of spike month the month of April and then everything goes back down May June July etcetera then that could be indicative that the entire market has contracted for whatever reason days on market until sale an 8.6% increase so this is the average number of days between when a property is listed and when an offer is accepted in a given month so you know people ask me how long does it take to sell a home in this market I tell them this is the average it's currently 63 days okay so that's up from 58 days a year ago however that's down month on month from February which was 71 now if you listen to the show you know it's not a month on month show I went into a ton of detail or not a ton of detail but I made sure I harped on that in a fairly recent episode however this is significant because if you look historically March is one of the higher months of the year right this is where we talk about seasonality March tends to be on the higher end for the year in terms of days on market but you can see that February was 71 days and then March came all the way back down to 63 days and so it's possible that we had a little bit of a seasonal blip where the highest months of the year were actually January February right the market just seemed to be really slow to start the year a lot of people felt that I heard that from a lot of people didn't affect me as much because I've made some changes to my business that have helped but it's very interesting to see March being so much lower than February when that is not normally the case right it's not that we don't sometimes have this sort of thing like we had it in 2017 here you can see the vertical lines are January and 2017 February was the highest month of the year but you go back one other year 2016 March was the highest month of the year and you know you go back to 2015 and January was the highest then February went down then March went back up so again there there's a lot of interesting stuff here but for me homes selling more quickly in March than they did in February is again just one of these odd things where it's like I think at the beginning of the year a lot of people were just kind of like waiting and seeing okay what's the year going to be like what's going to happen then they decided to you know jump on board in the month of March is that gonna continue we'll have to see because we might see some more you know seasonal trends being bucked as the year goes on because of all of these meta stories that are happening all of these macroeconomic things that are happening median sales price remember we had last month the median sales price went down for the first time in a long time year over year it went back up in March year over year so the median I prefer the median sales price over the average in terms of like what do homes sell for in the greater Greenville market generally speaking the median is the number I like to look at 323,950 so basically 324,000 that's a 2.8% increase from 315,000 a year ago that's a good number right 2.8% you know to be below three really I think Greenville really does best when we're seeing increases that are in like the 2 to 4% range year over year in home values that's been kind of the historical trend and so when we see when I see a number like 2.8% I'm like okay that's good that's what we want to see and you can look historically the past year most of the months have been between 2 to 4% so in terms of how home prices are appreciating and going up they're going up at a clip that for the most part is good now when you look at the 12 month meeting it's only 1.6% so that's a little bit on the low side but most months we are seeing appreciation that and again this isn't exactly appreciation but it's the closest metric that we have to it but we're seeing appreciation that is in line with kind of what the Greenville market kind of feels most comfortable to buyers and sellers now again all of this fluctuation in the data you know December was only point eight % increase then January hopped up to a 2.7% increase then February a minus point six % increase so basically a decrease of 1.6% and then march a 2.8% so again noisy very noisy data right now and so I'm just kind of waiting and seeing okay what exactly are we going to have some kind of a stabilization effect or is this just what the new normal is where it's just like from month to month it just kind of a crap shoot that's not great right that's not what buyers or sellers want they don't want the crap shoot thing because we want stability we want to know okay if I buy a home this year in a few years it's gonna be worth roughly this amount or if I list my home this month it's gonna sell roughly this quickly we don't like you know these trends to have weird anomalies in them and so that's something that makes me a little bit nervous the data itself doesn't make me nervous but the inconsistency of the data does make me nervous because that says that there is some that people are acting I don't want to say irrationally but they're reacting okay they're not they're not so much acting they are reacting to what's happening with the end result being that some months look way low in some metrics some months look way high in some metrics and it's just hard to really get our sea legs for what is this market like now if you're very interested in the average sales price again not the best metric for what average home prices actually are but that being said it's 408,003 61 that was a big increase 5.9% year over year on the average averages are skewed by you know once we get we sell a bunch of million dollar homes that that really pulls this number up that's why I prefer the median percent of list price received this is the percent found when dividing a property sales price by its most recent list price we talked a little bit about this in the episode that I did on overpricing your home so this is percent found when dividing a property sales price by its most recent list price so after price reductions then taking the average for all property sold in a given month not accounting for seller concessions right so if you're if a seller paid for closing costs that's not baked into this data but it's never been baked into the data and so looking at the historical trends is useful and so the March number was 9 point 98.3% so that was you know if you listed a home for $100,000 you could expect to get 98,300 that was a decrease of point one % so it was 98.4% last last March basically a meaningless right it if we're seeing 1.1% up or down like those numbers aren't important now it is noteworthy that we have not seen an increase in this since April right last April not this April 2025 so basically from may twenty five all the way through March 2026 every single month has either been lower year over year or flat year over year that being said I'm not drawing too many big conclusions from this because you look historically we're historically between you know 97 and 99% and we're right in the middle of that 98.3% so that by normal metrics would be normal for Greenville housing affordability index unfortunately took a big hit in March and this is because mortgage rates went up as a result of the Iran war this is because again prices continue to go up and I don't know if income data was affected at all because that's if you're on YouTube you can read what the housing affordability index measures it does take into account income data so I and that's the one thing I don't have access to so I'm not exactly sure what it might be factoring in for that but if you're curious the housing affordability index we like to be 100 or more that means that the median household can afford the median priced home given all of the economic conditions it's 96 for the month of March and that was a decrease from 1 0 1 in March 2025 so that's not great right a lot of that has to do with mortgage rates mortgage rates went way up in comparison to where they had been now they've receded a little bit let me go get a Mortgage News Daily real quick Mortgage News Daily has this at 6.29% as of the 17th I'm recording this on Sunday the nineteenth so you know we'll see what happens when the markets open tomorrow or even later tonight but at the moment you know housing affordability index should rebound a little bit next month you know once we get the April stats in because of mortgage rates coming down a little bit assuming that they don't just hop back up for whatever reason and if you're wondering the reason for the mortgage rates going up it's directly related to the war inventory of homes for sale 21% increase we're still seeing massive increases in in inventory so March was 5,614 homes for sale at the end of the month which is nearly 1,000 units higher than March 2025 which is 4,641 so this is just been a steady increase now this is again this is the highest that we've seen in 15 years so straight up inventory right not months of inventory but just straight up inventory highest in 15 years months supply of inventory a little bit of a different story still the highest that we've seen in 10 years but it's at 3.7 months of inventory again that would I mean in a traditional market that would be considered very much a seller's market in this market with all of the other weird things that we're that we're looking at I can't declare it's a seller's market on the basis of 3.7 months of inventory how did that compare to a year before it was 3.3 in March of 2025 that's a 12.1% increase which interestingly is the lowest increase year over year that we've had the past year so maybe we're finally starting to stabilize on months supply as well now if you're wondering why months supply hasn't gone up nearly as much as just straight inventory that's because demand is a lot higher right the demand for Greenville is much higher than it was 15 years ago and as a result our month supply is even though our general inventory is comparable to 15 years ago our month supply is only comparable to 10 years ago because that's when we really started to see a lot more demand coming for real estate in the Greenville market and that has continued as you guys well know to this day plenty of demand for our market for the Carolinas in general you know there's a lot of people moving not just to Greenville but to other parts of South Carolina North Carolina sorry I just had to do a little a little swoop with my hair I've got no product in my hair today I went to the gym earlier today and just took a shower I just didn't do anything with my hair but yeah that that's the reason why we've got month supply not like if month supply were what it was 15 years ago that was like the highest on record actually 15 years ago it hit the highest number of months that we've ever seen it was around like it was around like 13 and a half to 14 months supply that was that was like the bottom part of the Great Recession for Greenville so that's it's good that we don't have that cause that would be really really bad for everyone even you know buyers always think oh we want a recession because home prices will come down well as I've told you guys in the past yeah but then those buyers lose their jobs and it ends up becoming recessions often times become a huge wealth transfer from the poor to the rich that is usually what happens because they get they get protected by the government and then they use that Protection then buy up a bunch of cheap stuff that's cheap because of the recession and they buy it up often times from people that don't have as much money as them and so we don't want that to happen we don't want that sort of a recession to happen because really the only people that benefit from that are the wealthy and this is not a podcast well I'm not anti you guys know I'm not anti wealthy but I'm certainly not pro having massive transfers of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the upper class that's not great so let's not do that let's just keep months supply kind of where it at where it's at could go up a little bit could go down a little bit I don't think it would have a huge impact but I I'm fine with it being at 3.7 month supply I think that we can live with that so if you guys have any questions my contact information is in the show notes happy to answer any of those please let me know please as well if you need a realtor in this area go to those show notes and find my contact information reach out to me and if you like this content please like rate review subscribe leave me a comment on YouTube whatever the case may be we will talk to you guys again next time!