New construction along Carolina Bays Parkway is coming, as the Myrtle Beach area has seen an increase in new home building in recent years.
In 2023, 5,204 new homes were sold, according to the Coastal Carolinas Association of Realtors.
The new construction sales amounted to 35 percent of total home sales due to new construction, said 2024 CCAR President Brianne Bender. Bender, the director of brokerage operations for BRG Real Estate, said that building new homes helped drive the real estate market in 2023.
“That new construction is what was able to kind of sustain us over this last year and a half and be able to help buyers actually get into properties,” Bender said in an interview with The Sun News.
Part of that new building is near Arcadia Parkway. Construction equipment is preparing the property for new development, with large mounds of dirt visible from Carolina Bays Parkway. The entire project is part of a massive development plan approved by the Horry County Council Nov. 19, 2019.
The plan called for 858 single-family and multi-family units on about 267 acres of land, developed in 11 phases, according to the proposal approved by the county council. How many new homes will be added as part of this construction phase is unclear.
Since the 2019 approval for the project, the 267 acres of property have been sold as smaller tracts owned by different companies; the two parcels currently receiving site work are about 33 acres total, according to Horry County Land Records. Both are owned by Lennar Carolinas LLC C/O Jason Byham, according to Horry County Land Records.
Lennar is a national home-building company with sites in 26 states, according to the company’s website, and Byham is the Division President of Lennar’s Coastal Carolina Division, according to his LinkedIn profile. Lennar’s Charleston office did not return a request for comment before publication.
Lennar has already built homes nearby; its single-family home community Arcadia at 294 Empyrean Circle is sold out, with prices ranging from $339,000 to about $400,000. Myrtle Beach’s building market is still strong; Bender added that 2023 was not as strong a year for the real estate market as previous years, despite the average price of home sales rising 3.8 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, according to CCAR’s December 2023 market report.
“We had such an interesting year last year; we didn’t have as high sales as we had in 2020, 2021, and even 2022,” Bender said. “I think the majority of that is because we had the interest rates that were higher, a little bit of uncertainty in the market as to what was going on, sellers not being able to move because of interest rates being higher because they couldn’t then go and take the money that they got from their sale, and equally apply it and a purchase of another property.”
Bender added she expects 2024 to be more of a sellers’ market. She also said that listing supply should increase as interest rates decrease. However, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a recent 60 Minutes interview that interest rates probably won’t fall in March 2024. The earliest rate cut could be in the middle of 2024, according to a Bloomberg report of the interview.
