The Headline Everyone's Selling You Is Wrong
Open any market update for the Grand Strand's luxury segment this summer and you'll read some version of the same headline: sales are up, dollar volume is up, the coastal luxury market is on fire. Technically, that's true. Closed sales on $1M+ single-family homes are up double digits in three of our five core coastal markets, and total dollar volume has climbed sharply almost everywhere.
But if you actually sit inside the numbers instead of skimming the top line, a very different, far less comfortable story shows up. I think the $1M+ single-family market along Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Pawleys Island, Murrells Inlet, and Little River has already tipped from a seller's market into a buyer's market, quietly, market by market, over the past twelve months. Most sellers, and honestly most agents, haven't adjusted their pricing behavior to reflect it yet. That gap is where the opportunity sits right now, and I think it's about to close fast.
I could be wrong about the timeline. But the underlying mechanics are already visible in the data, and I'd rather say it plainly now than wait for it to become obvious to everyone in six months.
What "Booming" Actually Looks Like Underneath
Here's the trailing 12-month picture across our five coastal luxury markets, all filtered to single-family homes at $1,000,000 and up:
Myrtle Beach's active luxury inventory is up 20.2% year over year, new listings are up 25.9%, and while closed sales climbed 13.6%, the median sale price actually slipped slightly (-0.8%). Months of supply held flat at 7.1, already past the six-month line that typically separates a balanced market from a buyer's market.
Pawleys Island is the most dramatic case. Active inventory is up 52% and months of supply has jumped 77.8% to 8.0 months. Closed sales are up an impressive 32.1%, which sounds bullish, but the average sale price fell 6.3% and price per square foot dropped 6.1%. Buyers are transacting more often, at lower average prices, with far more choice than they had a year ago.
Murrells Inlet tells a similar story with sharper edges: median days on market jumped 30.2% to 125 days, months of supply sits at 8.8, and the median sale price is down 7.4% year over year. This is not a market where sellers can dictate terms anymore.
North Myrtle Beach is the outlier that proves the point rather than disproving it. It's the one market where inventory actually contracted (-4.0%) and median price rose (+8.5%), and it's also the one market where days on market fell sharply (-18.8%). North Myrtle Beach hasn't flipped. That's exactly why treating "the Grand Strand luxury market" as one monolithic story is a mistake. The same $1M+ buyer pool is behaving completely differently four miles apart.
Little River, the smallest of the five markets by sales volume, shows the most extreme swing: months of supply at 10.9 and a median list-price capture of just 88.6%, down 6.9 points year over year. With only a handful of closed sales annually here, I'd treat the percentages as directional rather than statistically bulletproof, but the direction is consistent with everywhere else except North Myrtle Beach.
This Isn't a One-Year Story. It's Three Years in the Making.
If you only look at the last twelve months, it's fair to wonder whether this is just noise, the kind of swing that reverses itself by next spring. It isn't, and the longer view is why I'm confident enough to put a number on my prediction below.
Pull the five-year chart on months of supply for Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Pawleys Island, and Murrells Inlet, and you'll see supply bottom out around 3.5 to 4 months during the 2022 frenzy, then climb almost without interruption for three straight years. Myrtle Beach's active $1M+ inventory alone has nearly tripled since early 2023, from around 37 homes on the market to 101 today, and that line still hasn't flattened. Days on market tell the same story in reverse: they compressed to a tight 65 to 110 day band through 2023 and early 2024, the tightest window of the whole cycle, and have been drifting back up ever since, most sharply in Murrells Inlet and North Myrtle Beach. Percent of list price achieved peaked around 97 to 98.5% back in 2022 and 2023 and has been sliding toward 95 to 96% since, with North Myrtle Beach and Murrells Inlet both dipping into the 92 to 93% range at points along the way.
In other words, what's showing up in this year's numbers is the tail end of a multi-year normalization away from an artificially tight, pandemic-era seller's market, not a sudden one-year event that's likely to snap back. The 2022 to 2023 window was the anomaly. What we're seeing now looks a lot more like where this market was always headed once that squeeze worked its way out of the system, and the trend line gives no indication it's done moving.
The Metric Nobody's Talking About: What Sellers Are Actually Accepting
Dollar volume and closed sale counts get all the attention because they're easy headline numbers and they flatter everyone involved. But the metric that actually tells you who holds leverage in a negotiation is percent of list price achieved at sale. Across four of our five markets, that number moved in the wrong direction for sellers this year: Myrtle Beach (-0.2%), North Myrtle Beach (-0.6%), Murrells Inlet (-0.4%), and Little River (a steep -6.9%). Only Pawleys Island improved, and even there it's sitting at 96.5%, hardly aggressive.
Combine falling list-price capture with rising months of supply and lengthening days on market in most of these submarkets, and you get the textbook definition of a market shifting toward buyers. The reason it doesn't feel that way yet is that dollar volume is still rising, because more transactions are happening at a wider range of price points, including some genuinely large sales pulling up the average. Volume can rise while pricing power quietly erodes. That's exactly what I think is happening right now.
My Prediction, Stated Plainly
Within the next 12 months, I expect list-to-sale ratios below 95% to become the norm rather than the exception across all five of these coastal luxury markets, including North Myrtle Beach eventually joining the trend. I expect Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet specifically to see actual median price corrections in the 5 to 10% range as elevated inventory forces sellers to compete on price rather than waiting out the market. And I expect the sellers who reject this and continue pricing off last year's comps to be the ones generating this fall and winter's stack of expired listings.
I want to be honest that this is an opinion built on trailing data, not a guarantee. Rate movements, a shift in out-of-state buyer demand, or a slowdown in new construction could all change this trajectory. But given that the underlying supply and days-on-market trends have been moving in one direction for three straight years now, I'd rather stake out a specific, falsifiable position than hand you another vague "the market remains strong" update that tells you nothing you can act on.
What This Means If You're Buying or Selling Right Now
If you're a buyer with $1M or more to spend on the coast, you are, for the first time in years, negotiating from a position of real leverage in four out of five of these markets. Longer days on market and lower list-price capture aren't abstractions. They're room to negotiate on price, closing costs, and contingencies that simply didn't exist eighteen months ago.
If you're selling, the data says the comp your neighbor closed at last spring is no longer your ceiling. In most of these submarkets, it may not even be your realistic target. Pricing to today's inventory reality, not last year's momentum, is the difference between a 90-day close and a stale listing that eventually sells for less than it would have with the right number on day one.
Why I'm Saying This Out Loud
Most market updates in this space are written to keep everyone comfortable: sellers feeling confident, buyers feeling urgent, nobody feeling like they need to change strategy. I'd rather be useful than comfortable. The data on $1M+ single-family homes across Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Pawleys Island, Murrells Inlet, and Little River is telling a more complicated, more actionable story than the headlines suggest, and I think the agents and buyers who see it first are going to be the ones who benefit most over the next year.
If you want the market-by-market breakdown for your specific property or search criteria, that's the conversation I'm here to have.
