Wake County hits record high median real estate price

Wake County reached an all-time high median real estate price in September — $390,000.

That includes in the median monthly price of recorded transactions under $1 million, which includes the vast majority of housing market sales activity.

“The beauty of a median is that … your outliers don’t affect the median price too much,” Luther Snyder, deputy director of the Wake County Register of Deeds office, said in an interview.

“We still have high demand, people are still looking for housing, and even with the supply being as low as it is, you still have a kind of price elasticity of the demand there, so people can still purchase a home.”

Snyder chalks up the record median price to “things happening the way they are economically in the region” in terms of new jobs and migration to the area.

This landed the Triangle as the No. 2 real estate market for growth in a 2022 forecast by the Urban Land Institute. The region also ranked first for homebuilding prospects for the fifth year in a row, The N&O reported.

Wake County had 2,590 transactions of less than $1 million in September. The total was $1.02 billion, down over $109 million from August’s transactions of $1.13 billion.

According to the Register of Deeds, the median Wake real estate sale price for all of 2020 was $322,500; in 2019 it was $303,000; and in 2018 it was $293,000.

Zillow indicates that the average price of a house in Raleigh was $303,000 in September 2020; in Cary it was $397,000.

Those Zillow Home Value Index prices jumped to $381,000 for Raleigh and $498,000 for Cary last month.

Median home prices across the Triangle region as a whole were up 18% in September compared to a year ago and resale prices were up 20%, according to the Triangle Residential Area Report. The average days on market in September was 18, compared to 40 days a year prior.

Wake County apartment sales high, too

The record month of September also saw over $470 million across seven real estate transactions in the “very high-value” segment of transactions, which are valued at $30 million or more. This is a $210 million increase from August, when there were only four transactions.

The Bell Preston Reserve Apartments in Cary sold for $110 million as the biggest transaction recorded in the county. In Raleigh, the Six Forks Station Shopping Center sold for $74 million, The Edition on Oberlin apartments sold for $71 million, The Greens at Tryon apartments sold for $61.8 million and the Lofts at North Hills sold for $32 million. The Bell Apex apartment complex sold for $56.9 million.

The high-value segment of transactions, which are worth between $1 million and $30 million, had 144 transactions totaling near $489 million.

“These (apartment) owners are cashing in and other investors are buying it up to see the potential growth, their return on their investment,” Snyder said.