Good Afternoon Everyone,

In the past two years the Charlotte Regional Realtor Association MLS area has seen the number of new listings decrease 21%, and the number of homes under contract increase 12.7%.The decrease in new listings and the increase in sales has caused the months of supply of inventory of homes to drop to 7.3 months of supply today from 12.1 months of supply of inventory two years ago. Please reference the related charts attached above.

A six month supply of inventory has historically been considered a balanced market. As our supply of homes for sale on the market approach this six month level we are beginning to see home prices firm up. And in the meantime, as we can see from the units under contract chart, demand for buying homes has continued to steadily increase over the past three years.

Attached above is the 3 year history of showings of our company’s listings. The number of showings of our listings has increased steadily. For August 2011 our listings were shown 629 times vs. 427 showings in August 2010 vs. 464 showings in 2009 (when the first artificial stimulus, first-time, home buyer credit was offered).

For the 12 months ending August 31, 2011 our showing traffic is up 15.6% from the period September 1, 2009 thru August 31, 2010. An increase in our showing traffic is a good predictor and indication that our sales for September will increase as well.

Despite the August debt crisis and despite the August downgrading of America’s credit worthiness, the American people, or at least those in Charlotte, were out shopping for houses in August in ever increasing numbers….a trend which has continued almost every month for the past 3 years! Uncertainty about the future of the national economy, it seems, does not mean that home buyers in Charlotte can’t recognize a good opportunity to buy when they see one.

Please take a moment to glance at the newspaper articles from the Charlotte Observer and Wall Street Journal. The Observer quotes Standard and Poor’s David Blitzer as saying, “This month’s report showed mixed signals….which suggest that we are back to regional housing markets, rather than a national housing market where everything rose and fell together.” Take this thinking a step further and consider the 13 zip codes our company primarily operates in and you can easily see that these zip codes have outperformed our entire MLS area.

The Case Schiller graph shown in the Wall Street Journal article shows the trend line of home prices of the 20 largest cities/MSAs from January, 2003 through June, 2010. Charlotte’s price trend line has one of the smallest bubbles, and our price change from the peak to the trough ranks us as the 4th best market among these 20 cities. Home buyers in Charlotte understand this.

Happy selling and listing,

Jeff