“I had not anticipated it being this difficult at all to find a house in Charlotte,” said Huck Broyles to WBTV Charlotte news. For nearly six months, Broyles and his fiancé Mary Helen have been looking for a home in the Queen City.
“We submitted an offer and within a day they had come to another determination,” Broyles said, “we got outbid.”
They aren’t alone. The housing market in Charlotte is hot right now. Many people are finding themselves in bidding wars to lock down the properties they like then outbid with an amount well over selling price by those cash bidders or buyers willing to buy site unseen.
Saying it’s a seller’s market is an understatement. Realtors say Charlotte’s housing market is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. Prices are skyrocketing, inventory is low, and demand is only growing.
According to Mecklenburg County officials, 99.2% of sellers are getting their asking price or more within 23 days of being on the market.
“We’ve seen large increases in our housing market throughout the year,” Michael Simmons, the county’s economist said.
Over the next 30 years, some 600,000 people are expected to move here, according to a county estimate, with a majority of those moving towards the state-line. A growing number of those are 20- to 25-year-olds now moving from apartments to homes, according to Simmons.
Charlotte is in the top five for attracting millennials and is also number one in the country for attracting baby boomers. North Carolina as a whole, is attractive to home buyers too as it ranks in the top five of states where people are moving.
For homebuyers this means a critically low level of inventory of affordable homes for sale. Charlotte home prices has gone up 12% in the last year, according to Zillow. First-time home buyers and single buyers are finding themselves priced out of the market with the median list price of a single-family home in Charlotte at $355,000. This is according to Realtor.com.
According to the Home Buying Institute, the Charlotte real estate market will remain extremely competitive throughout the rest of the year with strong demand and limited supply continuing to boost home prices higher.
Charlotte consists of 162 neighborhoods with 2,790 homes for sale according to Realtor.com. Of those neighborhoods, Myers Park is the most expensive. The median listing price there is $1.1 million. McAlpine is the most affordable neighborhood for buying a home with a median list price of $220,000.
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