The Median Price in Scotland County Hasn't Moved. Everything Underneath It Just Did.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Look up Scotland County's housing market and you'll find a number that looks almost boring. Over the three months ending May 2026, the median sale price sat at $189,000, up just 0.6 percent from the same stretch a year earlier. That's the kind of figure that makes a county easy to skip past when you're comparing Cumberland, Hoke, Harnett, and Moore side by side. Flat price, nothing to see.
Except in the same stretch of time, homes in Scotland County started taking twice as long to sell. Sixty-one days on market this year, versus thirty-one the year before. Only sixteen homes closed in May 2026, down from twenty-six in May 2025. And two weeks before this article was written, Governor Josh Stein stood at the Laurinburg-Maxton Airport and announced that an Alabama lumber company was about to spend $40 million and hire 43 people a few miles from where that median price sits.
A market that's genuinely dead doesn't attract a $40 million industrial commitment. A market that's genuinely hot doesn't take twice as long to close a sale. Scotland County is doing both at once, and the median price is the one number that hides it.
Start with what the slowdown actually looks like. A jump from 31 to 61 average days on market isn't noise, it's a market where sellers are sitting longer between showings and offers. Combined with sales volume dropping by more than a third year over year, the resale side of Scotland County looks like a market where buyers currently hold more leverage than the flat median price would suggest. If you're comparing counties on price alone, that leverage is invisible.
This matters for anyone weighing Scotland County against a neighboring county with a larger, more liquid resale market. A flat median can mean two very different things: a market in equilibrium, or a market where fewer, slower transactions happen to land near last year's number by coincidence. Sixteen sales is a small enough sample that a handful of unusual closings, high or low, can swing the median several thousand dollars in either direction the following month. That's worth knowing before anyone treats $189,000 as a stable benchmark.
Here's the part that doesn't show up when you Google "Scotland County median home price." The overall median blends two very different kinds of transactions.
New construction in the county has been running at a median sale price closer to $394,000 as of May 2026, more than double the countywide figure. That gap only makes sense if the much larger pool of resale, older-stock homes is pulling the blended median down well below both numbers. In a county this size, a small number of new-build sales at $350,000 to $400,000-plus can coexist with a resale market where plenty of homes still change hands for well under $189,000, and the published median ends up sitting in between, representing neither segment particularly well.
| Segment | What the number shows | What it actually tells a buyer |
|---|---|---|
| Countywide blended median | $189,000, up 0.6% (3 months ending May 2026) | A weighted average of two markets moving in opposite directions |
| New construction median | ~$394,000 (May 2026) | Builders are pricing for a buyer who isn't dominant in the resale data yet |
| Existing home days on market | 61 days, up from 31 | Resale sellers are absorbing most of the current slowdown |
Two active new-construction communities show what that higher-priced segment looks like on the ground. In Laurinburg's Idlewood neighborhood, builders are currently listing multiple floor plans, including a roughly 2,200-square-foot four-bedroom design and a 2,500-square-foot five-bedroom layout, both within a few minutes of downtown. Out at Deercroft, a golf community, new construction is going up on half-acre lots with open-concept layouts and granite or quartz kitchens. These aren't distressed listings sitting alongside a stalling resale market. They're active builds, priced well above the county median, moving forward on their own timeline.
That gap between resale and new construction becomes easier to explain once you look at what just landed at Laurinburg-Maxton Airport.
Great Southern Wood, the Alabama company behind the YellaWood brand, is building its first North Carolina location on 90 acres inside the Southeastern Regional Airport Authority's industrial park. It's the company's 17th treating plant nationally, a $40 million investment expected to create 43 jobs. According to coverage in Business NC, Scotland County beat out competing sites in North Carolina as well as South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, with Scotland County Economic Development Corporation president Jeff McKay pointing to the site's combination of rail, airport, and utility access as the deciding factor.
The incentive structure tells you something about the timeline. The $200,000 grant from the One North Carolina Fund and the $1.9 million in property tax grants from the county are both performance-based, meaning the company only collects if it actually hits its hiring and investment targets. Construction is set to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026, with operations starting by mid-2027. That's not a rounding error. It means the 43 jobs this deal promises don't exist yet, and won't for the better part of a year. A resale housing market can't price in jobs that haven't been filled, which is exactly why the current slowdown in days on market and sales volume isn't in conflict with the announcement. The two are simply on different clocks.
The backdrop makes the timing land harder. The county's unemployment rate stood at 4.6 percent in April 2026, well above North Carolina's statewide seasonally adjusted rate of 3.6 percent in July. The county's estimated population has also slipped, down to about 33,322 as of mid-2025 from a 2020 base of roughly 34,167, according to Census Bureau estimates. A county losing residents and running a higher jobless rate than the state around it doesn't automatically turn around the moment a company breaks ground. But it does explain why officials treated this specific deal as more than a routine ribbon-cutting, from Governor Stein's appearance at the announcement to Scotland County Economic Development Corporation Chairman Jim Willis calling it tremendous news for the entire community.
If the resale slowdown were the whole story, you'd expect builders to be pulling back too. They aren't. Idlewood and Deercroft are both actively selling new construction right now, months before the Great Southern Wood jobs materialize. That's either a bet that rooftop demand from the new plant and its supply chain will arrive on schedule by mid-2027, or a bet on a different buyer entirely, one drawn to the Deercroft golf community or to new construction generally, independent of the airport project. Either way, the builders active in Scotland County right now are pricing ahead of a labor market that doesn't exist yet. That's the kind of signal a median sale price will never show you, because it's forward-looking by definition.
For anyone weighing Scotland County against neighboring counties, the countywide median price is the least useful number available right now. Three figures matter more over the next twelve months:
None of these show up in a single portal's median-price widget. They require watching the county over several quarters, not one snapshot.
Is Scotland County a buyer's market right now? The resale data, longer days on market and fewer closings, suggests buyers currently have more room to negotiate on existing homes than the flat median price implies. That's a different situation from the new-construction segment, where builders are pricing closer to $394,000 and moving on their own schedule.
When would the Great Southern Wood jobs actually affect home prices? Not before mid-2027 at the earliest, since that's the target for operations to begin and the point at which the performance-based incentives would be paid out. Anyone shopping Scotland County today is buying ahead of that curve, not into it.
If you're weighing Scotland County against Cumberland, Hoke, Harnett, or Moore and want someone who reads a market by more than its headline price, that's exactly the kind of homework HIVE Realty Group does before a client ever sees a listing. Reach out and we'll walk through what a specific budget actually buys across each of these counties right now, not just what the median suggests.
