2022: Year in Review

Numbers do not always tell the whole story, and in this case, not by a long shot. The fantastic team at Carolina Plantations finished the year with sales of $112,892,847, compared to last year’s sales of $126,481,481. If you had mentioned to any of our Brokers in April that we would generate nearly 90% of 2021’s sales, they would have thought you were freaking crazy!

As for Brunswick County, our new listings and units sold declined while the average and median prices of homes increased from 2021 to 2022. Overall sales were down 6.5%; however, historically, these are still phenomenal numbers if you compare them to just ten years ago.

Since January 2, 2022, when Doug entered the real estate market here, we have been very fortunate in Brunswick County due to plenty of inventory to select from. And as our Martini Theory states, if you find the right Area and then community, finding you a home/homesite/condo is easy.

Our market dynamics this year have ranged from utterly baffling to that enormous frustration. Earlier in the year, we were still experiencing a 2021 rollover of “Covid Flight” from all over the states, which translated to too much demand and insufficient inventory. We had clients offering more than $20,000 because they sold their homes (up north) and had to find a place to purchase. Multiple bids were as common as lack of wintertime sunlight in New Hampshire, and the roads that real estate brokers had to navigate were complex and seldom rewarding. But we did it. The team at Carolina Plantations never gave up as we had to learn multiple new tactics to assist our clients in closing on homes in southeastern NC.

One of the factors we never thought we would face here was the shortage of available homesites, either newly released sites from developers or resales. As we believe in with our hearts, we have always found our clients the right solutions if they committed to our area and community, because if we could not find them a home, we could always find them an affordable solution by building – which over 60% of our clients have done since 2007.

We work with every developer here very closely, and there are no signs that there will be some newly released dirt in 2023. How much is anyone’s guess, but the demand is very high, and the supply is increasing slowly.

Another two factors here have been the cost of building materials and the time to build a home. For so many years, our building prices were some of the best up and down the east coast, and while we are still a bargain compared to many localities, our clients must pull back on the size and amenities to make their budgets work.

Coastal NC, composed of Wilmington, Leland, Southport, Shallotte, Ocean Isle Beach, Sunset Beach, and Calabash, will continue to be one of the Top 3 locations on the east coast to retire to in 2023. If this is the year you will get serious about leaving the frozen and busy tundra up north, then be sure to schedule a couple of days here with a Broker at Carolina Plantation. We have no idea if our area will meet your requirements, but one thing is for sure, no other real estate firm knows such a vast geographic area as Carolina Plantations does.