Standing near the entrance to Terrapin, the master-planned community he's building on Leland's northern edge, developer D. Logan summed up his first year of sales in one line: "We're off to a very, very good start." He wasn't exaggerating. Logan Developers Inc. had already sold 300 of the community's first 600 lots, fast enough that Logan moved up his build-out timeline for the full 2,800-home project from ten years to about seven.
That's a builder's market. For the owner down the road trying to sell an existing three-bedroom, the picture reads differently. Three separate trackers, measuring three different months, all point to the same shift.
| Tracker | Period measured | Typical days on market | Same period, prior year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Movoto | May 2026 | 86 days | 51 days |
| Redfin | Winter 2025 | 122 days | 57 days |
| Bankrate, using Redfin data | January 2025 | 77 days | 50 days |
No matter which window you check, the wait to sell a home in Leland has roughly doubled. That would be an easy story to tell if sales were slowing down. They aren't. Movoto counted 873 homes sold in Leland in May 2026, up from 537 the year before, a jump of more than 60 percent. A market where more homes are changing hands and each one takes longer to do it isn't cooling. It's absorbing more inventory than it's used to, and a lot of that inventory isn't coming from existing homeowners deciding to sell.
Where the extra supply is actually coming from
Brunswick County was the fastest-growing county in North Carolina between 2020 and 2024, adding enough residents to push the county's population from 136,689 to almost 170,000, according to state figures reported by WilmingtonBiz. Leland has absorbed a large share of that growth. Town officials told WECT in July 2026 that the town is on pace to more than double its current population again, to roughly 74,000 residents by 2045. Barnes Sutton, Leland's economic and community development director, said the town has already exceeded its own internal benchmark of 1,700 new residents a year, with the sharpest acceleration arriving during the pandemic as buyers moved in from states including New York, New Jersey, and Virginia.
Every one of those new residents needs a house, and Leland's builders have answered with entire subdivisions built for exactly that demand. Terrapin is the newest example, but it isn't building alone. Logan handpicked six homebuilders to work inside the community, including Atlantic Homes, Chesapeake Homes, Kent Homes, Legacy Homes by Bill Clark, Logan Homes, and McKee Homes, giving buyers a menu of new-construction options at a single address. Established communities like Brunswick Forest and Wedgewood at Lanvale have been doing something similar for years, pairing amenity centers and trail networks with a steady release of new lots.
That's the piece a headline price doesn't show. A buyer weighing a resale home built in 2014 against a new one at Terrapin, with a builder incentive on closing costs and a floor plan they picked themselves, often takes the new build. The resale listing doesn't get pulled off the market. It sits, waiting for the buyer who wants an established yard and a shorter drive to their current job over a brand-new kitchen.
The town is still catching up to its own growth
Leland's own regulatory machinery is a useful sign of how fast this has moved. Wilmington consolidated its zoning, subdivision, and building rules into a single unified development ordinance years ago. Leland has never done the same. Planning and Inspections Director Benjamin Andrea told the town's planning board in early 2026 that Leland's development regulations are still scattered across multiple chapters of municipal code first adopted in 1992, covering zoning, subdivisions, stormwater, streets, and flood provisions as separate documents rather than one coordinated rulebook. The town is now working through the process of building that single code, according to reporting from Port City Daily.
The town's decision to build a single, modern rulebook while growth continues shows officials updating their tools to match a pace of change that few communities in the state have seen. Much of Leland's current housing supply is arriving in large, coordinated batches from a handful of master-planned communities rather than trickling out one resale listing at a time.
What the median price is actually measuring
None of this means values are falling in Leland. But depending on which tracker you check, year-over-year price movement ranges from essentially flat to double digits. Zillow's home value index was up just 0.1 percent as of July 2026. Redfin's median sale price for its winter 2025 window was up 11.7 percent over the same period a year earlier. That spread is the real signal. A median built from new construction at higher price points closing alongside decade-old resale homes isn't one clean read on appreciation. It's an average of two different markets that happen to share a zip code, and new-build closings can pull the number up even when the resale home a mile away isn't worth meaningfully more than it was last year.
For a seller, that distinction matters more than the topline figure. A market where sales volume is up, prices are mixed depending on the source, and time on market has doubled is a market where pricing precisely and presenting well count for more than they did two years ago, not less. Redfin's data still shows the average Leland home selling for about 2 percent below list price, and homes priced correctly for their competition can still go pending in as little as 40 days. The listings stretching into the 80 and 120 day range tend to be the ones priced as if it's still 2023, competing against a builder down the street offering a rate buydown on a floor plan nobody has lived in yet.
A few questions worth asking before you list or make an offer
Is Leland's housing market slowing down? Not by sales volume. Movoto's count of 873 homes sold in May 2026, up from 537 a year earlier, points to a market absorbing more transactions than before. What's changed is how long any individual listing takes to find its buyer.
Why does new construction affect how fast a resale home sells? Communities like Terrapin, Brunswick Forest, and Wedgewood at Lanvale compete directly for the same buyer pool, often with financing incentives and warranty coverage a resale seller can't match without adjusting price or terms.
Does a longer time on market mean a lower final sale price? Not automatically. Correctly priced homes are still closing close to list price and in well under two months. The properties dragging the overall average toward 80 and 120 days tend to be priced ahead of what the current mix of competition actually supports.
If you're weighing whether to list a resale home in Leland this season, or trying to figure out how a Terrapin or Brunswick Forest listing down the street should shape your asking price, the Chris Luther Team can walk through what's actually moving in your part of town before you set a number.
