You're under contract on a condo, townhome, or subdivision home along the Grand Strand and your closing attorney just handed you a thick stack of HOA documents. Most buyers glance at them, sign the receipt, and move on. That's a mistake. The information in that stack is where post-closing surprises …

You're thinking about selling your home and wondering what you'll actually walk away with. The number you get at closing is not the sale price. It's the sale price minus a longer list of costs than most sellers expect. Here's a straight breakdown of what selling a home in South …

The 30 to 45 days between an accepted offer and the closing table can feel like a black box to first-time buyers and sellers. Papers get signed. Inspectors show up. Money moves. Somewhere in the middle, deals sometimes fall apart for reasons nobody explained clearly at the offer stage. After …

If you just closed on a home along the Grand Strand, congratulations — and pull up a chair, because your maintenance calendar is going to look different than the one you used in your last house. The coastal climate is hard on houses. Salt air, humidity, sandy soil, intense UV, …

First-time buyers shopping the Grand Strand walk in with the same questions every time, and most of the questions are the right ones. The trouble is the answers are different on the coast than they would be in an inland market. The homes are different. The insurance is different. The …

The price on the listing is the part buyers see first. The price of owning the home over the next ten years is the part that catches people off guard. I've sat at hundreds of closings along the Grand Strand, and the patterns I see in buyer surprise are consistent …

I've been writing offers in Horry County for more than thirty years, and the question that keeps coming up over and over is the same one: how much does this flood zone actually hurt the value? It's a fair question, because the answer changes a lot depending on the street, …

If you've been shopping rural homes in Horry County — Aynor, Loris, Galivants Ferry, the back roads off Highway 905, or the deeper pockets of Longs — odds are good the property runs on septic, not city sewer. I've watched a lot of out-of-state buyers learn this the hard way …

If you've shopped a home anywhere from Little River down through Garden City, your loan officer has probably already used the words "wind and hail" with you, and you may not have known exactly what that meant. After three decades of writing offers along the Grand Strand, I can tell …

If you have spent any time looking at homes along the Grand Strand, you have probably seen HOA fees mentioned again and again. South Carolina has a strong HOA culture, and the structure of those fees varies enormously from one neighborhood to the next. For buyers coming from out of …