A year earlier homes sold on average in 80 days. The South Carolina real estate market remained strong, and homes continued to sell in a record-setting time frame - throughout November it was 64 days. Closed sales were up 13 percent throughout the state in November, compared to a year earlier. South Carolina Realtors (SCR) released its November 2020 statewide real estate market data reflecting another month of unusually high sales. So that’s great news for Greenville and great news for the Upstate.”ĭespite experiencing a second wave in Covid-19 cases during the late summer, and a third, bigger wave in the autumn, South Carolina has remained firmly in the middle of a huge residential sellers’ market, due in part to low inventory levels and low interest rates. “Compared to elsewhere, Columbia and Charleston, for example, that are more service-based sectors. “It’s because Greenville, and the Upstate, is the most manufacturing-centric region of South Carolina, a very goods-intensive economy,” he said.
DEW SC OFFICE CHARLESTON PLUS
“That’s even closer to being comparable to where we were back in February.”Īt the height of the pandemic shutdown, employment fell 12.8 percent across 23 of the state’s counties – including eight in the Upstate, plus all of Charleston, Beaufort and Horry surrounding Myrtle Beach.Īs of November 2020, employment across the state had come back to around 76.5 percent of where it was before Covid-19.īut just in and around Greenville County, Von Nessen said the rate was even higher. “We’re now at 4.2 percent unemployment – which is within two percentage points of the pre-recession unemployment rate,” he said. “The important part is that these people left the ranks of the unemployed because they got a job, not because they gave up on looking for a job,” said DEW executive director Dan Ellzey.Īnd Von Nessen added that except for leisure and hospitality, which, at the earliest, isn’t expected to start fully recovering until late 2021, unemployment in all other sectors of the state’s economy are approaching pre-pandemic levels – a key indicator to more economic growth.
The hardest-hit areas included almost the entire Upstate, with a major decline in manufacturing and, almost the entire coastal region, stretching from Cherry Grove to Hilton Head, due to the plummet in leisure and hospitality, and the presence of the Covid-19 pandemic.īut while the number of pandemic cases continued to escalate throughout 2020, the state’s economic recovery began as early as June – when unemployment numbers dropped to around 210,000.īy August these numbers had dropped again to around 152,000 – and by October to 100,333. By April, it increased to 288,000, and eventually passed the 300,000 mark. In February 2020, overall unemployment in South Carolina stood at 2.5 percent (58,000 people) – which Von Nessen called “a historic low.”Īll that changed in March and April, during the first two months of the pandemic, when unemployment began rising in all 46 counties.īy March, the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce (DEW) reported that the number of unemployed rose to 61,000. With a virtual attendance of around 300 people, Von Nessen used slides and graphs to address more than 15 recovery topics, including: “We’ve seen some very strong recovery rates throughout this year.” “South Carolina’s economy has come back strong and is almost fully recovered in many areas,” said presenting professor Joseph Von Nessen, research economist with Darla Moore. Held by the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business in Columbia, the webinar featured a Federal Reserve banker and two USC professors and researchers, all of whom, despite the continuing rise of the coronavirus (Covid-19), said to anticipate another economic boom at some point in 2021 because of signs and trends happening across the state. More state jobs, more state employment and more opportunity for growth in 2021 – that was the view of several expert economists during a webinar late last year during the 40th Annual Economic Outlook Series.
0 kommentar(er)
