Half Way Through October, It’s Time to Close the Books on September

For the life of me I don’t understand why it takes so long for Smoky Mountain real estate agents to post their sales into our local MLS. It isn’t that hard, doesn’t take long to do, and we all use the stats to analyze the various aspects of our market and look for trends and opportunities. Knowledgeable real estate agents use these figures to better assist our clients and of course timely information is always better than incomplete or late data. Regardless of how much it irritates me or how simple the task should be, it isn’t going to change. To get a really complete picture of our Gatlinburg area real estate market you just have to wait for a couple of weeks for all of the dust to settle. Sadly, it isn’t over even then as I had to slightly revise my reported sales totals for both July and August as well as September to totally match the latest stats as reported by our Great Smoky Mountains Association of Realtors. With that long preamble, here is the latest market summary:

If you review these numbers (much more legible via the link) you will see that for the past 3 months we have, even if only slightly, bettered the same periods from last year. While this increase in residential units sold is small, it does appear to be the beginning of a recovery for our Gatlinburg area real estate market. As I always caution, a short period of time doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the longer term trend will follow but it does seem that we are on the mend. This can also be seen by the same data arranged differently as below:

If the market volume trend continues price increases will follow soon. With mortgage loan interest rates at historic lows and prices at levels not seen in several years there may truly never be a better time to purchase Sevier County real estate!