Kure Beach Real Estate Stabilizes on 2012 after final correction

Hi I'm Jay Seville the team leader of the JustNewLlistings.com team.  To see the sum total of my Kure Beach real estate vlogs or blog posts go to that website.  Once in awhile especially if you're a real estate blogger, you go, if you do some research you look at the numbers you look at the market data and you compare it to your own personal experience.   And I was doing that recently and because I show property all the time one of my favorite areas is  Kure Beach North Carolina.  And I was glancing at some market data a and was caught off guard at how negative the market data looked at first glance.  I wrote 6 months ago about how Kure Beach real estate trends were going against the tide.  I had observed that while the Wilmington North Carolina real estate market turned a corner in 2012 it appear that Kure was still down sliding.

If you look at this 1st picture you see the huge drop in luxury home prices in. The past 2 years. And then you see a little uptake at the beginning of 2013.  And of course if you look at January 2012 it's at 1 million and by the end of the year it's at 700,000, and your thinking wow it was a terrible year for Kure beach.

So I delved further into the matter and found out actually 2012 was great for Kure because the market stabilized, inventory dropped, and prices remained rock solid in most cases.

One initial thing you see is that inventory is down about 10% usually this is a good thing for the market as long as it doesn't get too extreme.  Nobody likes to look for a home when there is a real estate drought going on.

Another quick observation, is that the bottom price bracket or quartile actually showed a trend up in listing prices this last year. Now that is in stark contrast to the top price quartile which had plummeted. Of course most people are buying in the middle or at towards the bottom so the market for them is very stable.

The challenge in assessing a market like Kure Beach is that it is a very small so just one or 2 sales in a month completely distorts the picture of the market data; it leads you to incorrect conclusions that most inexperienced realtors would be prey to even though it went against everything they were feeling in the marketplace; they would not understand statistically what the problem was with the  graphs .

So with a lot of practice I have learned that the workaround to accessing these smaller markets is to go even deeper into finding similar properties almost like running numbers are doing comps within the market analysis itself and separating them into categories. So what I have next are 3 separate market analysis within the overall market analysis based on square footage and similar properties.

Comparing Similar Size Kure Beach homes and sold prices

As you can see from these smaller homes in the 1400 to 1600 square-foot range yes the prices dropped in 2012 at the beginning of the year and they stayed flat all the way for the entire selling season. In fact the end of the year had a bit of an uptick and you wonder if the market is going to bump to 3 or 5% this year

And you see the next size larger homes with 1800-2200 ft.² and you see May 2011 the sold prices have been completely flat almost unchanged. There was an uptick at the beginning or excuse me March 2012, however that was probably an oceanfront home or something and therefore distorted that's why you have to take larger units of measurements and as you can see by the end of the year there were several other sales all the same price for that same square footage.

And finally as you look at the Kure Beach homes based on much larger square footage 3500 ft.² plus and you see that home prices were much lower in 2012 compared to 2011, however they stayed completely stable or even rose in 2012 so for a whole year the prices have been stable with these larger homes in Kure Beach which is a great sign.

Conclusion: so what does this mean well if you ask me in means that Kure Beach real estate market now prices are done going down and should remain flat for the new year or perhaps even go up a few percent.   Let's see what happens.... 

One thing is for sure though each listing is case-by-case. You have to run the numbers on a home individually separate from any other interest you have an reach your conclusions regarding what is the lowest offer I can make on this home and still get a counteroffer from the seller.