Durham County Home Sales on the upswing

Last month's Triangle MLS report shows that a very promising upward trend in the home sales in Durham County. According to the report (embedded after the break), April saw double-digit increases in closings and a slight increase in new listings compared to the same time in 2011. While we are by no means back to normal, it looks like the Durham County is starting to come back from the deep crisis it had experienced in the past couple of years.

In other encouraging news, the percentage of original price received has gone up while the days on the market have gone down. From a pricing standpoint, however, the median sales price continues to fall, which is probably what is driving some of the upswing.

Durham County Real Estate Market Still Lagging

Despite several months of good news about the economy, the Triangle real estate market continues to lag, with both prices and sales of homes falling. To the extent there is any silver lining in this, it is that the Durham County is doing less poorly than either Orange or Wake countries insofar as the percentage of decreases is concerned. Triangle MLS, Inc., a local real-estate tracking firm, has excellent summaries of the state of the market, broken down by county and month on their website.

The depressing news is encapsulated well by the graph below.

But no all is lost! When looking at some long-term trends, the folks at Trulia Insight, a data-crunching arm of the real-estate powerhouse, came up with this fascinating infographic of people who are searching for housing across state lines. There are some interesting findings in this dataset when looking at Durham county, and the Triangle region more generally.