If you're selling a home in the Lowcountry right now, there's a question worth thinking about that has nothing to do with your home itself: how is the buyer who's going to write your offer actually searching?

The National Association of Realtors released its 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers in November, covering transactions from July 2024 through June 2025. It's the most comprehensive buyer-behavior data set we have, and a few of the numbers in it are worth a hard look if you're getting ready to list.

What the Data Actually Shows

Three stats from the 2025 report stand out:

52% of buyers found the home they purchased online. Not started their search online — found the actual home they bought. More than half of completed transactions traced back to an online discovery moment.

70% of buyers used a mobile or tablet device during their search. The screen most buyers are looking at when they evaluate a property isn't a desktop monitor. It's a phone. Often at night. Often in bed.

The median home search took 10 weeks. That's the typical timeline from "I'm starting to look" to "I bought a house." Ten weeks is not a long time, especially for someone trying to evaluate a market they don't live in.

A few other numbers worth noting from the same report: 88% of buyers ultimately purchased through a real estate agent or broker, and 85% ranked agents as the most useful information source during the search. So online discovery and agent guidance aren't competing — they're working together. The listing has to perform online to get the buyer's attention, and the agent takes it from there.

Why This Matters More in Our Market Than in Most

The NAR numbers are national. They reflect every buyer in every market — local moves, cross-town moves, and long-distance relocations all averaged together.

Now layer that against what's happening in the Lowcountry specifically. South Carolina added roughly 80,000 residents in 2025, almost entirely from domestic migration. Jasper County was the fastest-growing county in the United States. Beaufort County keeps adding residents year over year, and the bulk of that growth is coming from outside South Carolina.

So if 52% of all buyers nationally found their home online, the percentage in a market with heavy relocation activity is almost certainly higher. A buyer in Long Island or Northern Virginia who's looking at Bluffton homes isn't walking past a yard sign. They're not at Saturday's open house. The online presentation of the listing isn't one of several touchpoints — for a meaningful share of the buyer pool, it's the only touchpoint until they decide whether the home is worth a plane ticket.

What That Means for How a Home Should Be Listed

This is where the data gets practical. A few things follow directly from what NAR is showing us:

Photography has to clear a higher bar than it used to. When 70% of buyers are looking at homes on a phone screen, the difference between professional photography and average photography isn't a matter of taste. It's a matter of whether the home registers at all. Small images, bad lighting, and weird angles look terrible on a phone, and buyers scroll right past them.

Video and virtual tour content do work that photos can't. A buyer in Ohio can't walk through your house. If the listing has only static images, they're left guessing about flow, scale, and how the rooms connect. A walkthrough video — even a simple one — answers questions they can't ask. Drone footage answers questions about the lot, the neighborhood, and the proximity to water that a Bluffton or Hilton Head listing in particular benefits from.

The listing description carries more weight when the buyer can't visit. A local buyer reads the description as a supplement. A distance buyer reads it as primary information. The details about the neighborhood, the HOA, the flood zone, property taxes, schools, and what's actually nearby aren't fluff — they're the answers to the questions a remote buyer is sitting at home trying to figure out before they spend a Saturday flying down to look in person.

Mobile presentation is not a "nice to have." If 70% of buyers are searching on phones, the listing has to look good on a phone. That includes how images load, whether the description is readable without zooming, and whether the video plays cleanly on a vertical screen.

The 10-week search window puts a premium on timing. A buyer's typical search window is short enough that being absent from the relevant search results — or appearing with poor presentation — can cost the seller the entire engagement. There's not a second chance with most buyers. They scroll past and move on.

The Listing Strategy Question

None of this is a comment on whether a home will sell. The Lowcountry market is healthy and demand is strong. Homes are selling.

The question is how they sell, and at what price, and how quickly. Two homes on the same street with similar features can perform very differently based on how they're presented to the buyer pool that's actually shopping the market. The data from NAR makes it clear that the buyer pool is searching online, on mobile, in a relatively compressed window. The migration data from the Census Bureau makes it clear that a significant portion of that pool isn't local.

For a Bluffton, Hilton Head, or Beaufort seller, the takeaway isn't complicated. The marketing plan for your listing should be built around how buyers actually find homes in 2025 — and given where our growth is coming from, it should account for the fact that a real share of those buyers will never set foot on the property until they're already serious about it.

The listing has to do the heavy lifting before the showing ever happens.

👉 The Fastest-Growing County in America Is Right Next Door. Here's What That Means for Bluffton Sellers.
 👉 Where Homes Are Selling in New Riverside Right Now — A Neighborhood-by-Neighborhood Read
 👉 How Buyers Decide If a Home Feels Worth It

If you're thinking about selling in the next several months and want to talk through what a listing plan looks like when it's built around how buyers are actually searching in 2025, Jules and I are happy to grab coffee and walk through it. No pressure or pitch — just a real conversation about your home and the market it's going into.

Data sources: National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (released November 2025, covering transactions July 2024 – June 2025); U.S. Census Bureau 2025 Population Estimates (March 2026 release); South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce.

Jeff & Jules Moran
Anchor & Isle Real Estate
Bluffton & Hilton Head Island

Strategic Marketing. Experienced Negotiation. Real Results.
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