The Real Deal

By Sharman Egan Lagniappe columnist

Just when you thought life couldn’t get any better along Mobile Bay, the long-awaited RSA Battle House Tower and the Battle House Hotel finally open and ThyssenKrupp chooses Mobile for their new $3.7 billion steel mill and the Earnhardts decide to add two more tracks to their little park up in Prichard – all in one glorious long weekend.

The face of the Mobile real estate market will no doubt change dramatically over the next several years (don’t you just wish you had a few hundred acres of pasture land up in Calvert?). But if you’re looking to sell or buy now, you want to know what the market looks like now, not what it will look like a year or two down the road.

My last column looked at the home market on the Eastern Shore. This time we’ll look at four sections of the city of Mobile: West Mobile, Springhill/USA, Cottage Hill and Downtown/Midtown. As before, the numbers cited are from the Gulf Coast Multiple Listing Service as of the end of March so they don’t include “for sale by owner” listings. The numbers were compiled by Barbara Reeves, a Realtor with ReMax by the Bay in Daphne, and appear on her web site, http://blog.mymobilerealestate.com.

We’ll look at the West Mobile area first.

• 75 homes sold in March, at an average sales price of $193,860 and a median price of $177,475

• 132 homes pending (under contract but not yet closed), at an average price of $208,233 and a median price of $163,400

• As of April 1, 386 homes were listed for sale, at an average list price of $267,784 and a median price of $229,900

• 5 months inventory on the market (“inventory” is calculated by dividing the number of homes currently for sale by the number of homes sold in a given month plus pending sales.)

Moving east, the Springhill/USA area had the following figures:

• 22 homes sold, at an average price of $206,834 and a median price of $141,500

• 21 homes pending, at an average price of $257,069 and a median price of $164,900

• 114 homes listed for sale, with an average price of $377,660 and a median price of $199,900.

• 5 months of inventory on the market

Cottage Hill had the highest average price of the four markets.

• 55 homes sold, at an average sales price of $209,971 and a median price of $143,000

• 88 homes pending, at an average price of $193,815 and a median price of $160,040

• 236 homes listed, with an average price of $214,426 and a median price of $169,900

• 4 months of inventory on the market

Downtown/Midtown was the most interesting market in this group because prices there were about half what they were in the other areas.

• 63 homes sold, at an average sales price of $101,173 and a median price of $82,800

• 110 homes pending, at an average price of $128,698 and a median price of $103,500

• 371 homes listed, with an average price of $149,380and a median price of $99,900

• 6 months of inventory on the market

You probably aren’t surprised to see that the dollar figures above are much lower than those on the other side of the Bay. What you may not know is Mobile’s median home prices are much lower than prices across the board in the U.S.

As pointed out in the cover story of the last issue of Lagniappe, the median price of homes in Mobile is 66 percent of the national average. In 2006, according to the National Association of Realtors, the median sales price for existing homes in the U.S. was $221,900. In Mobile it was $137,000 (this does not include Baldwin County). So you can bet most people moving here from other areas are going to be pretty happy when they see what their money will buy. And all those workers at ThyssenKrupp making $50,000 to $75,000 per year will be able to afford homes that are well above the median price for the area.

I’d say if you’re looking for a bargain, you need to hightail it to Midtown (the low figures above are a reflection of prices in Midtown; as of the writing of this column there were only nine homes for sale in Downtown priced below $100,000). With the overall growth in Mobile and the boom in Downtown in particular, I can’t believe the low prices in Midtown will continue. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I do have a vested interest here….I’ve been wondering why prices are so low ever since we moved to Midtown a year ago. We originally planned to buy in Daphne, but when we found out what our money would buy in the historical areas of Midtown, we couldn’t get across the Bayway fast enough.

Regardless of which area of Mobile you’re interested in, the figures above indicate it’s a good time to buy (or sell) a house in Mobile. The inventory figures (a measure of how many months on average it takes to sell a home in a particular market) indicate a market that’s well balanced between buyers and sellers. And the low prices allow for plenty of upside potential. But I’d say that two years from now, it will all look very different.

Sharman Egan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact her at Sharman@SharmanEgan.com.

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