A hurricane like Helene was never supposed to hit Western North Carolina, so it should come as no surprise that Western North Carolina was woefully unprepared for anything like her. Highways, roads, and bridges disappeared into previously peaceful rivers and streams. Cell service was non-existent for the better part of a week, and as I write this article I’m tethering from my phone’s personal network because the internet is still down.
This is a sensitive topic. As I write these words we are less than a month from Helene's landfall in WNC, which means we are very much in the midst of grieving and recovering.
I want to be as respectful as possible to that reality, but I also want to highlight a positive message based on what I know to be true of Western NC’s housing market as of Oct. 14th. To do this, I'm going begin with a big part of how this article ends:
The active market of homes for sale in WNC has proven to be extremely resilient given the scope and scale of Helene's devastation.
The data below around homes that were withdrawn, temporarily off market, or allowed to expire—homes, and more importantly families that were likely negatively impacted by Helene—does not tell a happy story. Compared to any other month, these numbers are many standard deviations away from normal, and this includes COVID times. But, given the scope and scale of the devastation brought by Helene, it could have been a lot worse.
Setting The Tone
We are still weeks and months away from being able to assess the full extent of the damage that has been caused, but it’s already clear that Helene will rank among the top five most economically devastating hurricanes in US history. It also already ranks among top ten deadliest, and even though this analysis focuses primarily on the economic ramifications I would be severely lacking in my humanity if I didn’t acknowledge the profound human tragedy underlying these statistics.
Entire families and neighborhoods have been devastated by this hurricane.
Although it’s too early to tell what kind of long term impact Helene will have on Western North Carolina’s housing market, we are beginning to see a clear picture as to how it is impacting the market in the short term.
You'll soon read a staggering number representing the total economic value taken off the market. And it is staggering. But with only about 7% of all listings that were available the day before Helene falling into that category (as of Oct. 14th, and this number should continue to fall as we'll discuss below), it also highlights the impressive economic value of Western North Carolina's housing market as a whole.
With that in mind, here's how I'd ask you to consider interpreting the overall message of this article: The people of Western North Carolina have been showing up day in and day out to come back stronger than ever from this disaster, and, at least to date, the housing market has been showing up right alongside them.
Some Quick Notes About The Data
This is the first article in a 3 part series that will cover Helene’s effect on WNC’s real estate market with an emphasis on residential real estate, also known as the housing market.
I've spent the last few years building software for the Ruiz Report and our sister company remc.co to analyze CanopyMLS’s real estate data. They currently represent 26 counties spanning both North and South Carolina, which will allow me to run our Hurricane Helene analysis for following affected counties:
Even though these seven counties were among the hardest hit, it is important to note that this is an incomplete picture of Helene’s impact. I can only report on the datasets that I have, so I want to be clear about the article’s important yet limited scope at the outset.
Each graph is based on an initial list of available listings under the “Active,” “Active Under Contract” and “Under Contract” statuses from September 26th, 2024, the day before the storm, listed as a “Single Family” property type (think residential real estate).
You’ll notice that some of the graphs begin on September 20th, exactly one week before Helene made landfall in WNC. This pre-storm window offers a stark contrast to the tumultuous and uncertain period that followed. The red vertical line demarcates September 27th, the day Helene made landfall in WNC, serving as a clear before-and-after reference point. Although this does mean that some of the pre-Helene data is included in the totals on the y-axis for the stacked line graphs, you'll see that that data is generally negligible in scope (it is also not included once we start talking about economic values).
Finally, I’ve designed the analysis so that the graphs in this article update every night with fresh data, ensuring the most up-to-date information is always available, and each graph is interactive, allowing you to filter each one by the county that matters most to you. The data will continue to update until all homes from the initial set of available listings are either sold, withdrawn, or expire.
It is my hope and goal that this in-depth analysis will give us a unique view of the impact a natural disaster of this magnitude has on a residential real estate market.
Let’s get started!
What Did The Market Look Like The Day Before Hurricane Helene?
A great place to begin is with a point in time look at the market the day before Helene.
This graph represents all of the Active listings (homes for sale) and combines them with those that were Under Contract (listings with an accepted offer that hadn’t closed yet), which gets us a very close approximation of the entire market on that day.
The rest of this article will focus on different subsets of listings from this initial graph.
With a total of 3,923 listings across all 7-counties we can see that 30.2% of them were Under Contract. This is a pretty decent pending ratio considering the fact our dataset covers all price ranges across what amounts to almost the entirety of Western North Carolina. You can read any of our latest reports for more in-depth information, but it's safe to say that the overall market was competitive in the days leading up to Helene.
Some Sellers Decided They No Longer Wanted To Sell
With this baseline established, let's begin our analysis by focusing on the market segment most obviously impacted by Hurricane Helene: withdrawn listings.
Under normal circumstances there are a number of underlying factors that might motivate a seller to take their home off the market, but the two most common reasons are dissatisfaction with an agent's performance or unmet offer expectations. Putting the usual reasons sellers withdraw their home from the market to aside for the moment, I’m going to make an assumption that a majority of the listings were withdrawn in days and weeks following Helene because of one of the following four reasons:
- The property was damaged beyond repair
- There was a loss of access to the property
- The property was sufficiently damaged, negatively impacting its potential sale price
- Another area of the homeowners' lives was impacted enough by Helene that selling no longer made sense
With our imperfect assumptions in mind, let’s see what we can deduce by analyzing the daily number of homes taken off in each county:
What becomes immediately clear from this graph is that Sellers and their agents had more important things to do from the 27th, when Helene hit, until at least the 30th.
On that note, I would like to take this opportunity to shout out the real estate community at large because they showed up in a very big way in the aftermath of Helene. Local agents, investors, and property managers pivoted in the blink of an eye from their usual roles to become ad hoc relief workers. They distributed essential supplies, provided temporary shelter, and offered assistance to tenants and community members alike, effectively bridging the gap before official government services could mobilize.
We started getting very spotty cell service on the evening of Sunday the 29th, so I commend all of the hard working agents who got right back to work come Monday morning! Even with the communication networks partially coming back online, the decision to withdraw a property from the market remained difficult and complex due to ongoing infrastructure challenges.
Hiding in the daily counts is the all important cumulative count. This total number is at least part of the answer to the question “How many homes were taken off the market as a result of Hurricane Helene?”
The aftermath of Hurricane Helene reveals a telling trend in Western North Carolina's housing market: a surge in Withdrawn listings.
What was less apparent in the daily graph is much more dramatic when you look at the cumulative totals. We can now clearly see that an enormous number of homes were taken off the market as property owners and agents began the process of assessing the damage and making the difficult decision to withdraw their listing.
We are going to revisit this graph when we speak about the economic impact Helene has had on the WNC housing market, but even this graph in isolation is enough to say that the scale of disruption from this storm is unprecedented in our area.
Some Sellers Decided To Take A Step Back
Another metric of market disruption is the surge in properties temporarily withdrawn from sale. This status, less final than a full withdrawal, allows sellers to pause their listing while maintaining their relationship with their agent. It's typically employed when unforeseen circumstances arise, offering flexibility to reassess the desire to sell, address property issues based on showing feedback, or wait out market fluctuations.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, the spike in temporarily off-market listings likely stems from four primary factors, again diverging from typical motivations:
- Immediate damage assessment and repair needs (only the most avant-garde buyers are looking for homes with a tree coming through the roof!)
- Something happened to the home they were trying to move into
- Logistical challenges in showing or uncertainty about post-disaster property valuations
- Another area of their life was impacted enough by Helene that selling may no longer make sense
With these additional imperfect assumptions in mind, let’s turn to the data:
Once again we see that priorities were shifted, but this graph shows a much larger spike in activity compared to the "Daily Withdrawn Homes by County" graph. This suggests that many sellers opted for a temporary pause rather than a full withdrawal, possibly hoping to reassess their situation once the immediate crisis passed.
As we mentioned previously, this is a much easier decision to make and I would be willing to bet that most agents worth their salt recommended every one of their Sellers go ahead and take advantage of this status to ensure they had the grace and space to take care of their families and communities first.
It's also worth noting that it's hard to sell a home without utilities. As of this initial publication on October 14th, the City of Asheville does not have running water and they are not alone. Some areas are still without power, and others are weeks and months away from essential roadway and bridge repairs to ensure access to their properties and the surrounding communities.
These are all valid reasons to put the sale of a home on pause, and the data seems to support this hypothesis compared to the normal temporary off market activity.
Continuing our efforts to fully quantify the impact of Hurricane Helene on WNC's housing market, we turn to the cumulative total of homes temporarily taken off the market, employing the same methodology as before.
Yet again the daily fluctuations graph does not do justice to what we can clearly see in the cumulative totals put on display above. This graph depicts a steep and sustained increase in homes temporarily taken off the market across all counties, beginning immediately after Helene's landfall on September 27th.
Buncombe County, represented by the darkest blue area, shows the most significant increase, but the cumulative effect is particularly telling. By mid-October, the total number of homes temporarily off the market across all counties has reached 637, a figure that dwarfs pre-hurricane levels. I've been publishing the Ruiz Report since March of 2020, which was the very beginning of COVID, and I have not seen anything close to these numbers before.
This massive shift suggests a collective "pause" in the market in harder hit areas as property owners and agents grapple with the storm's aftermath, assess damage, and reconsider their selling strategies in light of the changed circumstances.
The sustained upward trajectory of the graph, even weeks after the hurricane, points to the long-lasting effects of Helene on the housing market. It suggests that the impact on real estate operations, which includes agents, lenders, inspectors, closing attorneys etc., extends far beyond the immediate aftermath of the storm, potentially influencing market dynamics for months to come.
How much money are we talkin’ here?!
With the withdrawn and temporarily off market data in place we can now answer one of the most fundamental questions about Hurricane Helene’s immediate impact on Western NC:
What is the economic value of the homes taken off the market as a result of Hurricane Helene in Western NC?
Now that we have a methodology to track withdrawn and temporarily off market listings we can start calculating the value of the potential economic loss as a result of these listings being removed from the market.
There is one important caveat: temporarily off market listings can, and historically often do return to active status. This means that this number should go down over time.
A unique feature of the graph below is that I'll be running a daily analysis of property statuses against the original list of homes from the day before Helene on September 26th. This means homes that return to the market will be removed from the graph, thereby reducing the economic value lost, while those that ultimately decide to withdraw will be memorialized in the data.
The strategy for this daily analysis is to total the List Prices for each of the homes that was withdrawn or remains temporarily off market on that day. If you've heard me speak then you know I love saying that the list price is "a price that no one has agreed to!" which is true, but with an average of roughly 98% list to sale across the board (there are more nuances here that we'll have to ignore for now), it's a close enough approximation to aggregate the potential economic value lost in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
Once all of the original listings are either closed, withdrawn, or expired, we'll be able to answer with more confidence, but in the meantime this is an exciting approximation for a data nerd!
In a word: Wow.
This graph and what it represents is a sobering image of the tragedy Western North Carolina has endured. While list prices serve as a reasonable proxy for the economic damage done to the active residential market, the figures on this graph pale in comparison to damage done to the much larger number of single family homes that were not for sale. The devastation to our neighbors and neighborhoods will be felt for years to come.
Early analysis shows that the market averaged approximately $20M in property values removed from consideration, per day, from September 28th to October 6th, when it jumped $48.3M from $136.5M to $186.8M. It has continued adding to that total by removing another $10M a day, on average, until at least October 12th.
Based on our last update, the total economic value of homes taken off the market as a result of Hurricane Helene in Western NC is $516,018,475.
By mid-October, the total potential economic value lost is fast approaching $300 million, a figure that underscores the profound and lasting impact of Hurricane Helene on the region's housing market. It's worth reminding the reader that this graph is dynamic, which means that the total can and should decrease as some of the temporary off market listings return and sell, but extent of this recovery remains uncertain.
Putting This Number Into Perspective
It is crucial to contextualize the potential economic value taken off the market within the broader housing market landscape.
On Oct. 14th, the $248 million in potential economic value lost represented only a fraction of the market's total impact. This figure was derived from approximately 7% of listings in the initial dataset that were either withdrawn or temporarily off-market. Even though there's no way for a direct extrapolation here, it does mean that the total value of the market on that day, or any given day in WNC, is magnitudes of order greater than this! (Note: I won't update these numbers unless there is a significant change in order to make the point.)
People want to live here. A lot of them. The sheer size and volume of the housing market in the region underscores its inherent resilience, reinforcing the optimistic outlook mentioned at the beginning of the article. This robust demand for housing in WNC serves as a powerful counterbalance to the immediate disruptions caused by Helene, which I am interpreting as a strong foundation for recovery and long-term market stability.
What Happened To All The Of The Listings That Were Under Contract?
If you’ve ever bought or sold a house then you know that there is equal parts joy and anxiety once you go under contract. On the one hand, your search for a buyer or seller is over (which is probably the biggest problem in your life at that point), and on the other hand everything that could go wrong usually starts going wrong once you’re under contract.
Things went very wrong for everyone that was under contract when Hurricane Helene made landfall in WNC, at least that was everyone’s initial reaction
This chart offers us our first bit of direct good news with respect to the housing market's resilience in the face of Helene's devastation.
The vast majority of deals have remained under contract as of mid October. If you also include transactions that have since closed in that good news, and you should, then we can conclude that the overwhelming majority of the homes that were under contract when Helene made landfall have had a successful outcome.
This is another dynamic graph to watch as the situation unfolds in the coming weeks and months.
Approximately 6.0% of the pending deals returned back to active status (which means the contract fell through), and only 4.2% were withdrawn while under contract. On the other side of that, 71.7% of these homes have closed! These are impressive numbers given current circumstances, and they serve as a testament to market participants' commitment to seeing a deal through once under contract.
We'll be keeping our eye on those properties that were taken temporarily off the market and provide updates in future articles.
Where Do We Stand?
We can now confidently paint a picture of where Western North Carolina's housing market stands in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene (that's updated daily!), and that picture looks like this pie chart:
I'm going to break this pie chart down into three categories: the good, the less-good, and the bad.
The Good
- 33.7% of the homes that were available the day before Helene are still active
- 11.7% remain under contract
- 31.7% have already closed 🥳
The Less Good
- 5.5% of the homes and their families are in limbo. These homes are temporarily off market while they make their final decision.
The Bad
- 10.7% of the homes have withdrawn
- 6.6% have allowed their contract to expire
Whether you're a pie chart kind of person or a list reader, you should now be able to see the resilience I've been talking about: the homes in "the good" category make up the overwhelming majority of homes that were available for sale before Helene.
While the previous graphs depicting withdrawn and temporarily off-market homes showed dramatic "up and to the right" trends, and the economic value lost is indeed substantial, this pie chart offers a crucial re-orientation to the overall perspective. It contextualizes these impacts within the broader market landscape, revealing a more nuanced and ultimately encouraging picture of the real estate market's resilience in the face of Hurricane Helene.
This is not to say that the storm wasn't as bad as people have made it out to be—it was perhaps even more devastating than widely perceived in many areas—but the market's underlying strength is evident in the post-Helene outcomes to date.
Closing Thoughts
We are less than a month away from our Presidential election and the overarching narrative in the US is that we are a divided nation. While this may unfortunately hold true for many crucial issues, I can now say with one hundred percent confidence that when it mattered most every single person I ran into was willing to give the shirt off their backs to help.
The people of WNC have opened their homes, their wallets, their hearts and their minds to help their neighbors in need. I liked WNC before, but I like it a lot more now.
I think the data paints a picture of a resilient market that’s poised to bounce back. I hope that I’ve presented the information objectively enough for you to draw your own conclusions about its resilience in the face of this historic natural disaster.
That being said, if you're a praying person then I would ask you pray for the many families and communities who are not feeling very resilient right about now. The term 'tragedy' barely captures the magnitude of loss many families are struggling with in the wake of Hurricane Helene, and no amount of aid is going to heal those wounds. It is my belief that these are issues only God can address, so I ask that you please pray for them.
What Next?
In Part 2 of this article series we’ll discuss what’s happening with new listings (inventory) and new deals (homes selling) after Hurricane Helene. Part 3 will cover the longer term impacts Helene has had on closing prices in the area.
