Ocean front prices crack for Carolina Beach condos

Hi. This is Jay Seville the owner of ocean views real estate Incorporated in the Cape Fear Realtor Association, and the main website we work with is Wilmington-real-estate.com. today I thought we’d look at the subject of oceanfronts Carolina beach ocean front condos and trying to hammer out what are the new market values for oceanfronts. What is the market like for Carolina Beach oceanfront condos and some side commentary on the overall Market? And I haven’t uh done much writing or concentration for a while I’ve been busy I’ve been distracted I bought another house. a lot of my insight on the market comes from my boots on the ground experience in negotiating contracts such as  how many offers are on the table when I write contracts, how long have these homes been listed when I show them, etc.? And I’m talking about a wide spectrum of properties.; I’ll be showing Oak Island homes in the 400s; I’ll be showing homes in Brunswick forest in the 500s. I’ll be looking for homes for a bigger investor that wants at least six bedrooms that grosses $200,000 a year oceanfront on any Beach so my eyes are peeled and lots of different niches of real estate at all time, and sometimes I get really focused in one Niche while other times I’m spread across four simultaneously.  So it just depends but anyway uh the market is very different than it was in April and May 2022. That is what I’m going to call it was a real estate frenzy some weird prices happened there. It was a brutal time to buy a house. I wrote so many contracts because there was you know three to eight offers on each home, Etc. so it was just quite laborious. I do tend to win three out of four offers when there’s multiple offers which is just unbelievable. No one comes close to me, but still it’s a lot of extra work dealing with multiple people in an extreme seller’s market type scenario.

Carolina Beach Ocean front prices drop 8%

So let me just show you some examples and we’ll pop around a little bit. One of the things that bothers me about real estate uh stats is often the the numbers are not really like indicative of what’s happening out there. Here is Carolina Beach oceanfront condos. These are oceanfronts and I’m calling out in particular uh two-bedroom units okay and according to the stats the days on Market is five, four and five for all this time period. But these stats are just not accurate in a lot of ways that I come across– in particular days on market! And I know because I’m out there showing properties and for a while I’m showing homes and everything is under contract in three days. Then months later I’m showing homes in the same area again and everything’s been listed for 45 to 60 days, and I’m telling myself wow this is completely different way of doing business. Now I can low ball and this is going to be a lot more fun.

So I’m going to pull some currently active homes that are under contract or that were for sale and show you the difference. Supposedly the data shows all these are four and five days on the market for this niche of real estate oceanfronts and Carolina beach for condos, but the reality is if you look here you’ve got this one’s been active it’s been active 144 days. This one the 181 days, 104 days, 83 days, 78 days okay so uh you get the the point. And then if I go further down here’s one that was also 178 days and then uh then 65 days so um that is quite a difference compared sold last uh last year and you you go look at the ones that were sold in the spring last year like September that’s listed in April and May April then we’re going to compare and see the days on Market here starting with this one for 6 30. and that was yeah a lot of them were four to ten days okay.   If you look at other niches like one bedrooms a number of those were just like one in two days so we’ve gone completely to a different Arena now where the homes and the oceanfront condos…a lot of them are overpriced and they’ve been listed for four months: 144, 78, 178 and 181 so there’s been a profound difference in the Carolina Beach oceanfront Market. The homes are now listed for months and months and what you have are sellers clinging to Old Market values, and what I mean by that is during that frenzy in April and May we had some really high sold prices like this one was $640,000 it was only 815 square feet 580, 821 square feet, 631, 828 square feet and let’s see but you get the idea they were closing like $620-630,000 and now you go look at the similar size uh units that are active and we have instead uh 550, 559,  610,000.  Here’s here’s uh another one 589, so you’ve got all these but then some people are still hanging on to these old prices of 620. Well if all these are listed for 560…I’m sorry you’re not worth 620 anymore you’re like you’re like smoking crack and wasting our time.

So what is the lesson from all this ? The market has changed for oceanfronts in North Carolina using this particular Niche we see the days on Market is much higher which gives you a great chance to put in a reasonable price a lot of these Oceanfront 2/2s (2 bedrooms 2 bathrooms) that are listed for uh 550, 560, 610 you know they’re worth maybe 550 but it’s legit to offer $500,000 flat so the problem is if you go to this dude and He’s listed 619 and you offer 500 they’re just gonna not even respond to you probably. So we have a problem where the sellers are behind the market. It happens every time we have a frenzy the seller is always six months late and they’re crucifying themselves that they didn’t sell back in April 2022 and so the point is it may take several homes of low offers to find someone who has an epiphany and wants to do business with us. I go through this process every few years and it’s messy but it always works out oh by the way just another example at Oak Island you had a three bedroom two bath Oceanfront Cottages. But I’ll just put it this way they peaked around $920,000 and now there’s several listed for like 775 or 800 so we have had a solid five percent correction sense May and does that apply to Inland Real Estate? No, not necessarily because Oceanfront vacation rentals are totally different than Inland Real Estate. They almost have nothing to do with each other.  One can be going up while the other is going down and vice versa; it’s it’s two different Arenas. A lot of that is because it’s all about cash flow expenses and the rental numbers right now if a home is grossing a hundred grand a year uh its expenses used to be 40,000 a year but now with the mortgage its expenses are 60,000 a year so the investor is short 20K of what they used to have. So the numbers don’t work anymore so therefore they can’t afford an eight hundred thousand dollar price anymore. To make the numbers work they can only afford a six hundred thousand dollar price, and that’s a huge discrepancy because of the interest rate change.  So the point is you don’t have that issue with Inland homes most of the people buying these homes are actually moving into them so it’s not about cash flowing expenses anymore.  It’s about necessity and a bunch of other variables.