Vacation home sales pick up in resort towns in sign of recovery’s staying power
Photo Credit: Sales of vacation homes are spiking upwards in resort towns such as Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Flickr.com / Lee Coursey
Skift Take
The surge in vacation home sales in key resort communities bodes well for vacation rental companies such as HomeAway as buyers often purchase their homes as investments or at least rent them out for part of the year.
Leslie and Scott Tyree backed out of a contract in 2011 to buy a weekend place in Hilton Head, South Carolina, fearing they’d be anchored to a sinking market for second homes. This year, the West Virginia couple pounced on a listing in the same resort town without visiting the property.
They bought the two-bedroom condominium in an oceanfront golf resort for $429,000 in April. Values this year in the Hilton Head area jumped 11.1 percent from the first five months of last year and sales rose 9.3 percent, according to the South Carolina Association of Realtors. Prices are still down by about a third from 2007, near the real estate market’s peak.
“We knew several other people were looking at it and it wouldn’t last long,” said Leslie Tyree, 44, a lawyer who first saw the home two weeks before the closing. “We realized if we are going to do this at some point we might as well do it now.”
The surging buyer confidence underpinning the year-old rebound in U.S. property
