If you’ve been in the Huntsville area housing market this year, you know the stories. Homes sold the day the sign goes up in the front yard. Bidding wars. Bidding wars in areas locals might not expect.

Some of the stories are hype and some are true, local real estate agents say, but they agree that inventory is low at all price levels and prices are rising as the area grows.

“We’re sitting about 1,000 homes less on the market than the same time last year,” Huntsville Area Association of Realtors President Cindi Peters-Tanner said this month. “And we still have growth. We still have demand.”

Fewer homes and more demand means competition, Peters-Tanner said. “It pushes prices and reduces days on market,” she said. “Right now, that’s a huge number for us.”

Homes in the Huntsville area – generally considered to be all of Madison County – are staying on the market for an average of 45 days, Peters-Tanner said. Other figures put it the number at 36. The number used to be in the 90s.

Cindi Peters-Tanner, president of the Madison County Board of Realtors, says the real estate market is heating up in growing Huntsville, Ala..

“Where’s the tipping point?” Peters-Tanner said Realtors are asking themselves. “Home prices are rising, inventory is falling. These two things are going to meet. We don’t want them to cross. We don’t want the prices to go way, way up or we’d be California.”

“That’s not going to happen,” she quickly added. “This is Huntsville."

The market is already out-performing expectations for the year. The Alabama Center for Real Estate (ACRE) forecast 3,635 homes sold in Madison County by the end of June. The actual number was 3,805.

What’s driving the market? A big part is obviously the new jobs announced for the area. A 4,000-employee plant announced in 2018 doesn’t mean 4,000 people in the housing market in the spring of 2019, but it does mean more people in the market fairly quickly.

The FBI announced in 2018 that it is moving a major part of its data operations to Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal meaning up to 2,000 jobs. Toyota and Mazda are building automobile manufacturing plants here bringing another 4,000 direct jobs and more in supplier companies.

“These things are waves,” Peters-Tanner said of moves for things like the FBI relocation. “Yes, people are already coming in from things such as the FBI. We’ve seen that. Mazda-Toyota’s already had people move here – higher-ups and things like that.”

“That does happen. There’s going to be waves,” Peters-Tanner said. “But a lot of our market is also people just coming from another part of the country. Maybe they’re just transferring within their company. Or have accepted a new job.

“And don’t forget we also have move-up and downsizing buyers and sellers,” she said.

Here are some other quick facts about the June housing market in the Huntsville metropolitan area, according to ACRE:

- The metro area of Huntsville and Madison County is beating forecast sales by 4.68 percent as of June

- New construction accounted for 24 percent of total home sales in June. There were 191 new homes sold out of 788 total sales for the month.

- The median price of a home sold in the metro in June was $268,000, 6 percent higher than June 2018.

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