Real estate shortage causing seller’s market in central Mississippi

RANKIN COUNTY, Miss. (WLBT) - Brian McGairty, a realtor for Havard Real Estate Group, will be closing on a sale this Friday. The house on Terrapin Creek Road sold in two days.

“They found it, they liked what they saw, they submitted an offer, they had that pre-approval letter on file, that they were able to share with us and the seller obviously executed that and went forward with that offer and it became a contract,” he said.

Nationally, there are half as many houses for sale as there were five years ago. That epidemic hasn’t missed Mississippi, where the inventory of homes on the market is 1/3 of what realtors consider a stable market.

In Mississippi, there are currently under 550 homes for sale in Hinds, Madison and Rankin County, and 2,000 realtors in the market trying to sell them.

It’s a seller’s market, and the average prices in the metro reflect that.

“You’re looking at spending around $320,000. That’s the average price in Madison County. In Rankin County, you’re looking at $235,000, and in Hinds County it’s $169,000,” said Lee Garland, of the Garland Group.

Homes under $200,000 are often seeing multiple offers in the first week on the market. Garland said that as of Monday, there are only 12 houses under $200,000 for sale right now in Madison County, and only 30 in Rankin County.

And if you’re looking to buy right now, McGairty says have your pre-approval letter in hand and be ready to move fast when you find that home of your dreams.

And if you’ve been thinking about selling?

“Even though inventory is low in Central Mississippi, you know, you can obviously get more for your home now than you could in years past,” said McGairty.

But the home shortage won’t last forever. Garland says it’s a matter of time before the market fills out again.

“2021 is going to be an interesting year,” Garland said. “There are people who put their houses on forbeyance when they were not making their mortgage payments. There’s a huge number of those out there, and as soon as the federal government lets go of that moratorium of foreclosures and evictions, I think we’ll see more of those properties on the market.”