By Emmy Benton, Staff Writer

Looking around our area, you may notice an abnormal amount of For Sale signs in front of houses. Houses are selling fast and realtors are as busy as ever. 

Danielle Taylor, a local real estate agent for Keller Williams Realty OBX, credits this current productive real estate market to a long period of time where there has been an oversupply of inventory, which led to buyers having more negotiating power. But now, the tables have turned and sellers have the upper hand. 

“With the increased demand and lower inventory, sellers are in a better negotiating position,” Taylor said. 

This has led to a booming real estate market for our area. Real estate agents are seeing numbers that are unusually high and this has kept them busy for the past several months. 

“Pretty much since they reopened the bridge, we’ve seen the activity increase, and May was really the first month that the bridge was opened and people could get back on here easily,” Taylor explained. “So from May through September, the number of homes going under contract and then subsequently selling has been up every month.”

Statistics from the Outer Banks Association of Realtors show a 32% increase in the number of residential properties being sold. 

“At the end of September, it was 978 residential properties under contract,” Taylor said. 

There were only a total of 549 properties under contract in May 2020. This number is for all classes of properties and not just residential properties. 

More houses being sold should mean more people moving onto the island and enrolling their children in school, right? 

Not quite. First Flight High School hasn’t seen a significant increase in the number of new students registering this year.

“It looks like it’s about the same for new students,” guidance counselor Lisa Wheless said. 

She thinks it felt like more students due to the increased class sizes this year. The ninth- and 10th-grade classes are the biggest out of all four grades. The ninth-grade class coming in had 241 students and the 10th-grade class had 239 students. 

Beth Garrett is another counselor at FFHS and she feels the same as Wheless when it comes to an increase in new students. Both feel as though the coronavirus played a part in it. 

“I feel like it’s not as many and I honestly attribute that to Covid,” Garrett said. “So far this year there are 33 (new students). By this time last year we had 59 new students.”

This year, like most, still had new students enrolling in school after vacationing on the Outer Banks. This is typical and our guidance counselors see this happen most years. 

Even though there’s a decrease in new students, some of the students have told Wheless it was because of the pandemic.

“Some of them have said because of the pandemic, they didn’t want to be where they were,” Wheless said. “They wanted to be somewhere where it was less stressful, less incidents of Covid.”

Taylor has seen similar trends within the real estate business. She thinks that the coronavirus has led more people to buy homes in our area and says there are two reasons as to why this is.

“For our area specifically, I think the two things are that people that live in the more populated cities and areas are looking for places that have less population and more outdoor space for activities they can do outside,” Taylor said. 

In addition, real estate agents are seeing more people moving here from farther away.

“I’ve had more inquiries from people that live further eest than I ever have before,” Taylor said.

The high school has seen a similar trend: “We have people from all over the country: California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Idaho,” Garrett said.

And people are still coming.

According to Taylor, we can expect more months of a busy housing market: “No end in sight, really.”

Sophomore Emmy Benton can be reached at 23bentonem58@daretolearn.org.