Buyers and renters both finding uneasy housing market.

• Position: South Carolina residential real estate trends

The seasons are changing in South Carolina and so are conditions on the residential real estate market, with recent statistics suggesting it is no longer exactly a buyer's or seller's market in many regions of the state.

For buyers, home prices remain high while interest rates on mortgages are going up as the Federal Reserve has raised rates in an effort to slow inflation.

Meanwhile, unlike this time last year, sellers are not seeing their homes get snapped up as quickly in some parts of the state, with the amount of available inventory slowly rising in some areas while the number of buyers decreases, experts say.

At the same time, many renters are having a hard time finding available and affordable space because of a lack of available rental units, and builders aren't rushing to build new ones in some markets because of high building costs and difficulty finding property.

"It's harder to buy and harder to rent right now than it was last year," said John Smith, president of the Central Carolina Realtors Association. "That is something we're seeing in the Midlands and also what we're hearing from people in Greenville and Charleston as well. The market for sellers is still good, but some sellers are pulling back because the demand has dropped. In many cases, they're not getting the prices for their home that they got back in March and April of this year."

Prices for a new single-family home in the greater Columbia area continue to remain high, with the median sales price in the Columbia market at $276,790, according to an August market report from the S.C. Association of Realtors. That's up from an average price of $274,818 in July, and 20.3% higher than the median price in August 2021.

This follows a statewide trend, according to statistics compiled by the association, which indicate that median sales prices jumped 19.7% in the second quarter and 17.6% in July alone.

While they might get more for their home, it is taking sellers a longer time to make that sale.

Sellers in the Columbia area are facing a slightly longer wait times to sell their homes, with average days on the market rising to 22 days in August from 21 in July, according to statistics from the Consolidated Multiple Listings Service, which covers listings in the Columbia metropolitan area.

The supply of inventory in the region also was at 1.6 months, the same as in July but a 45.5% increase over July 2021, according to the CMLS report.

Buyers in the region are facing challenges...