Real estate: Amid market slowdown, I'On holds its own

The neighbors didn’t fret when Bob and Barbara Fry listed their home for sale this year in the acclaimed I’On community. After all, the Minneapolis natives were just moving around the corner.

Soon after buying a second home here in 2001, the couple decided to spend more of their time in Charleston after Bob Fry, a marketing executive, retired. So earlier this year, a neat black “for sale” sign went up in their yard, and the Frys began preparing to move to a roomier, $1.35 million home nearby in I’On.

Their sign joined dozens of others already posted across this nationally recognized “neotraditional” neighborhood of about 680 homes. About one out of nearly eight residences in I’On is for sale. That’s a steeper ratio than on Daniel Island or in the town of Mount Pleasant, where one in 11 homes is on the market.

To anyone who drives through the community to marvel at its creative “New Urbanist” design, all those "for sale" signs prompt an immediate question: What’s happening in this picturebook-looking place that’s causing so many people to put their homes on the block?

But a closer look at the numbers shows that real estate in I’On has held its ground relatively well amid a messy overall real estate market. Home sales have cooled only slightly there, while the Charleston region as a whole faces declines of 30 percent to 50 percent from the peak of the boom.

Read more in Monday's Business Review.