PHOTOS COURTESY OF INTRACOASTAL REALTY CORPORATION I 46
T WAS Pender County — badly battered in 2018 by a devastating hurricane — that saw its real estate market shine the
brightest in 2019 in the tri-county coastal area.
Pender posted the best sold volume gain among New Hanover, Pender and Brunswick counties, plus the increase in the
number of actual sales, coming back 15.7 percent in sold volume and 7 percent in number of sales over the previous year.
With $1.9 billion in transactions, New Hanover experienced a 12.4 percent volume gain, with 5 percent more property
sold, while Brunswick had an 8.6 percent gain in sold volume and a not quite 4 percent increase in the number of sales
over 2018.
Sales began slowly because the county was still in recovery from 2018’s Hurricane Florence.
“But we ended with a bang,” Coldwell Banker Seacoast Advantage’s Christine Cronick says. “We saw a downturn in the
market because of the hurricane but not as drastically as north of us. And because a lot of people were displaced, they had
to buy.”
WBM february 2020