Thinking about selling your home in Briar Chapel, or thinking about buying elsewhere in Chapel Hill?  Here is what you can expect....

• April 2024 (April 2023)
  
  • Number Sold: 17 (15)
  • Average Price: 651,309 (601,707) +8.2%
  • Avg/Median Days: 18/10 (44/40)
  • Avg Price/SqFt: 273 (246) +11%
  • Months of Inventory:  0.8 (1.2)

No bad news to report here.  Average prices and price per square foot rose more than we've seen in quite a while and the time on market is back to just a couple of weeks compared to a month and a half last year.   This squeeze of inventory is also shown in the inventory - so if no new homes hit the market Briar Chapel would "sell out" in less than a month.    This has been the story since 2022 - about a month of inventory.  This keeps prices appreciating even though we have macroeconomic factors - like interest rates that would otherwise depress demand and keep prices flat, or worse.   This also means when a home does hit the market, there's a ton of activity (compared to pre-Covid) and homes go under contract.  Not totally unexpected as the April/May are generally the busiest times of the year, but I'm just glad this has reversed our recent trend of slower sales.  

Let's look at the year to date:  

• 2024 (2023)
  
  • Number Sold: 35/37
  • Average Price: 629,943 (567,324) +11%
  • Avg/Median Days:  29/15 (66/46)
  • Avg Price/SqFt: 263 (253) (4%)
  • Months of Inventory:  1 (0.9)

More good news for the year - so far - with average prices up 11%.  The time on market is also a fraction of this time last year, so if I were a bettin' man (and I'm not because I like my marriage), I would say that people have gotten over the sticker shock of higher interest rates and have realized they're not going to come down any time soon.  

The one question I have is the price per square foot being up "only" 4%.  First, 4% would have been a fine year before 2020.  But, it's still early in the year and this data only includes one month of the spring market with a heap of slow winter numbers thrown in there.  I expect that 4% to go in to the upper single digits by the time we hit June/July.