Home Buyers Demonstrate There's No Place Like Home - Especially During a Pandemic
Few could have scripted the wild ride area real estate took during the pandemic of 2020. Coming off a robust 2019, the market looked strong and started at a good pace. Then stopped. Then skyrocketed.
“If you told me in the spring that we would have the year that we had, I never would have believed you,” says Michelle Clark-Bradley,broker with Intracoastal Realty.
“Everything just shut down in March and April, even well into May, then Memorial Day weekend everything opened up and we made up for lost time very quickly.”
While life as we knew it continued to shift seismically, the real estate market roared from zero to 100 mph quickly.
“We went from no or very few showings to you put it on the market and you might be getting multiple offers over asking price within a few hours. It has gone from one end of the spectrum to the other for sellers,” Clark-Bradley says.
Other Realtors echo the pattern of a good start, a near stop, and then a flurry of buying brought on, they say, by the uncertainty of what the future would hold.
“2020 started off with a bang, but the COVID outbreak in March stopped the market in its tracks,” says Vance Young, broker also with Intracoastal Realty. “Honestly, I thought we were looking at a 2008 market, which was a sobering experience for anyone in the real estate industry.”
It proved to be the opposite.
“Most election years, buyers will sit on the sidelines, but the COVID phenomenon pushed buyers to upgrade their homes and to buy second homes,” Young says. “The result was our best year ever, especially in the high-end market locally.”
New Hanover County had $2.5 billion in closed brokered sales, a 31 percent increase over 2019. Brunswick County saw a 50 percent jump in closed sales, while Pender County logged a 44 percent increase.
The top sale in New Hanover County was $5.5 million, a 10 percent increase over last year. Four homes matched or bested the highest New Hanover County residential sale of 2019, which was $5 million.
At 3.2 million, Brunswick County’s top sale was 45 percent more than the previous year, however Pender saw an 8 percent decrease.
“All of the beach markets in the region, from Ocean Isle Beach through Brunswick County, New Hanover County beaches and on up into the Topsail area have all been on fire this year,” says Nick Phillips founder and principal broker of Landmark Sotheby’s International Realty.
The flight to “refuge markets” from big cities was huge and spurred in part by more people working from home.
“There is a seismic shift in the way corporations do business and people who can work from anywhere are coming to our area,” Phillips says. “Companies large and small have now realized they don’t need their teams to work inside office buildings to be productive. The pandemic also reminded people of the value of a second home as a refuge for their family.”
Phillips closed the No. 2 New Hanover County sale of the year, a waterfront estate on Futch Creek Road in Porters Neck built by Lending Tree CEO Doug Lebda. It sold for $5,277,000. The 3.6-acre home site is uniquely situated on a knob in the creek.
Surrounded by water on three sides, it enjoys sunrise and sunset views. The property was previously owned by the late Episcopal bishop of East Carolina, Thomas Wright, and his wife. The new home Lebda built on the site in 2014 retained the double-sided fireplace they enjoyed. The property includes a 2,000 sf guest house and saltwater pool.
“It was only on the market for a few days before a Raleigh tech CEO purchased it as a retreat property,” Phillips says.
Two key phrases define the 2020 market: home refuge seekers and primary-secondary home buyers.
“We have really seen people wanting a home refuge,” Coldwell Banker Sea Coast Advantage broker Jessica Edwards says. “People wanting to have a space to work, play and unwind all in one space. And if you have children, that adds a whole other level; people are thinking about homeschooling. We’ve seen an increase in clients wanting a true home office space.”
(This is a small section of the February 2020 Real Estate Roundup for Wrightsville Beach Magazine, February 2021 Issue)
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