To put it mildly, home sales in South Carolina were brisk during the COVID pandemic. In June, 2021, for instance, SC Realtors reported a huge year-to-date uptick in home sales, a healthy upswing in median sale prices, and a 30% drop in the number of days residential properties spent on the market in every region of the state.
A year later, total year-to-date sales cooled in most regions, but median prices were still climbing everywhere, and properties were spending even less time on the market than they were the previous July.
So far this year, it’s a different story for real estate in South Carolina. Home sales statewide are down about 19% through the first half of 2023, according to SC Realtors, which attributes the slump to lower inventory and higher borrowing costs.
And while median sale prices are still up in every region except the Piedmont (they’re down 1.3% there), properties are spending significantly more time on the market – 46.8% more time so far this year, compared to this point in 2022.
In the middle of this trend, there is a rise in foreclosures across the U.S. that is nearing pre-pandemic levels, according to real estate industry tracker ATTOM.
And ATTOM finds that South Carolina posted the sixth-highest foreclosure rate in the country in the first half of this year – 0.19% of all housing units in the state had a foreclosure filing through June. That’s 4,511 housing units, one in every 515.
That rate of 0.19% ties South Carolina with Florida, marking the only two Southern states among the 10 with the highest foreclosure rates so far this year.
And while South Carolina’s year-to-date foreclosure rate is 1.25% down from this point a year ago, it is 174% higher than it was in 2021.
Columbia’s rate of 0.29% is the fourth-highest among 223 American metro areas measured by ATTOM. Florence’s 0.26% is eighth-highest.
The U.S. national average rate is 0.13%.
