Savannah Area Monthly Real Estate Market Update July 2023

Local Market Statistics

The median home price in the Savannah Metro maintained an all time high in June of $315,000, while the days it took the median home to sell remained low at just under 30 days on market.  The fact that home prices locally continue to rise despite 7%+ interest rates is a strong indication that our local economy and housing market remains incredibly strong, even though some other housing markets around the country are showing signs of weakness.

May is typically the month of the year that sees the most new listings, and 2023 was no exception as the number of new listings decreased slightly from May to June.  The total number of active listings increased slightly over the same time period from 2,569 to 2,653, indicating that June brought more sellers to market than buyers.  This is understandable – interest rates hovered near 7% the entire month, but were closer to 6.5% most of May.  For perspective, in June of 2019 there were 5,020 active listings in the Savanna metro area, which means that we have roughly 50% of available housing inventory than we normally expect to see.

Monthly Savannah sub-market report

This will be a new section of each monthly email where we analyze a specific sub-market in our area.  This month we will analyze available starter home inventory in Chatham County, Richmond Hill, and Rincon.  We will define a starter home as a home that a household would be able to afford at current interest rates with a combined income of $85,000 – which means a house available for $326,000 or less.  We will also only include houses that are move in ready.

Each green house on the map to the right (below) is one house for sale that meets our criteria for a starter home.  There are just 75 homes available in the entire area: four of which below $200k, 18 below $250k, and 32 below $275k.  Eleven of these 75 are condos or townhouses.  In Richmond Hill there are seven with the cheapest being a 994 square foot home listed for $241k.  Rincon has similar numbers as Richmond Hill. The average size of these 75 houses is 1,344 square feet.  For some perspective, there are currently 404 total active move-in ready listings in this area at all price points

The key takeaway of the analysis here is that there’s just not much inventory for “average” folks to buy right now.  Looking forward to new inventory that may hit the market also doesn’t present much encouragement – if we narrow the search in that same area down to new construction only, we will see 120 total new construction listings.  Out of those 120, only eight of them are priced below $326k.  Our advice to someone looking to buy in the sub-325k price point is this: buy whatever you can get your hands on and afford.  They’re not making new starter homes, and with the Hyundai plant opening soon and other manufacturing jobs coming to the area competition for existing inventory is sure to increase.