By SPENCER TIERNEY

NerdWallet

Electronic bank statements have virtues — saving trees, keeping your desk uncluttered — but they also have a vice: They can be easy to forget.

You could instead get paper statements delivered by mail, an option that’s becoming less popular as technology gets better.

But Nessa Feddis, senior vice president for consumer protection and payments at the American Bankers Association, says they “won’t disappear entirely.”

Whatever form they take, these monthly records help you spot fraudulent purchases and errors and, in the case of bills, remind you of payment deadlines.

Here’s what you can expect from bank statements in the future and how to decide whether sticking with paper makes sense for you.

A more digital future

Bank statements played a key role when balancing a checkbook was common. You would keep track of deposits and withdrawals on paper and compare your numbers each month with your statement. One perk to using paper is being able to mark it up.

But, just as checks gave way to debit cards, paper bank statements are being replaced by electronic ones and other technology.

“Instead of a formal document at the end of the month, it’s a rolling, continuous spending tracker,” Cole Kennedy, a copywriter in New York City, says of his bank’s tracking feature. His bank also provides graphs of his spending history.

Many banks have tools such as mobile alerts to help prevent fraud, and someday digital banking might affect paper statements too.

“We’re not going to snap our fingers and stop sending paper” to people who want it, says Rob Krugman , chief digital officer at Broadridge, a customer communication and analytics firm that delivers financial statements on behalf of thousands of brands. “But there’s an opportunity to make the paper and the digital work together.”

For example, he says, a one-page statement could have an integrated chip in the paper, which you could scan with a smartphone to see more details online.

‘Going paperless’ isn’t for everyone

Banks have encouraged customers to opt into electronic statements, or “go paperless,” for over a decade, and the push continues; a quarter of banks now charge a fee to send a paper statement, according to 2014 data from banking analytics firm Novantas.

About 61 percent of checking account customers only receive electronic statements, according to a 2017 survey by Javelin Strategy and Research.

But some people don’t benefit from e-statements. About a third of U.S. households don’t have access to broadband, or high-speed, internet at home, according to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center.

Banks, by law, have to make paper statements available as an option. They can’t assume everyone has internet access.

Accessing a statement online at a library or other public place might not be as secure as accessing it through your home network. Plus, having a smartphone might not be enough.

It’s “very different seeing a bank statement on a full sheet of paper (rather) than a small screen,” says Chi Chi Wu, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. Certain transactions and bill deadlines on credit card statements might get overlooked and lead to missed payments.

Why some prefer paper

Even people who can easily receive statements online may prefer paper for various reasons:

To cut through information overload online. Emails about statements can get overlooked in a crowded inbox, and checking e-statements usually requires logging onto online or mobile banking and downloading a PDF.

“Clients who have paper statements check them at least once,” says Dana Twight, certified financial planner and owner of Twight Financial in Seattle. “It comes in the mail and they see it.”

In contrast, Twight adds, her clients with e-statements don’t read them, except maybe around tax time.

To keep a more permanent record. Computers crash and files get lost, so storing statements digitally isn’t foolproof. Although paper takes up space, having a copy at hand can be more reassuring than one in cyberspace.

To make it easy for family to find, if necessary. If an older person can no longer manage their finances, relatives might need to step in. Finding paper statements might be easier than tracking down bank website passwords.

Save your statements

Tax audits, lawsuits and other situations may require a bank statement. Storing paper in a safe place is intuitive, but e-statements should be saved offline too, either printed out or saved on your computer. Some banks keep them available online for up to seven years.

Whatever the future may hold for statements — paper or digital — they’re important financial records.

By DAVID PORTER

Associated Press

NEWARK, N.J. — As the push to legalize sports gambling in the U.S. nears a crucial Supreme Court decision, states hoping to reap a financial windfall could face another hurdle: Attracting younger players used to online fantasy sports.

The explosion in popularity of daily fantasy sports has created a generation of sports fans more attuned to gauging individual player statistics than how two teams may fare against each other, the challenge at the heart of traditional sports wagering.

Even more important, experts say, is whether states will be able to offer online sports wagering to a demographic raised on smartphones and laptops. That will depend heavily on how the Supreme Court decides New Jersey’s case, expected this spring.

“How motivated are people going to be to get in their car, drive 45 minutes, park, walk through pathways and walkways just to get to a remote corner of a casino?” asked Daniel Wallach, a Florida-based attorney considered an expert in sports gambling law.

New Jersey has challenged the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, the 1992 federal law forbidding all but Nevada and three other states from authorizing gambling on college and professional sports. Only Nevada offers betting on single games.

How the court rules will affect more than two dozen states that are pushing sports betting legislation or considering it if New Jersey is successful.

If it is legalized, one of the challenges will be capturing sports fans like Nick, an experienced daily fantasy player from Maryland who also regularly places traditional sports bets with a bookie through his smartphone or computer.

While illegal, that may still be a more attractive option than traveling to a brick-and-mortar location to place a legal bet.

“Part of the convenience now is that I can place a bet from anywhere,” said the man in his mid-20s, who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because he was talking about doing something illegal. “I probably would stay with what I have right now, with the convenience and accessibility.”

The stakes are huge. Currently, illegal sports wagering is estimated from the tens of billions of dollars annually to as high as $100 billion or more.

A survey commissioned by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association in 2016 estimated more than 57 million people participated in some form of fantasy sports, in which competitors pick rosters of players and win or lose based on how those players perform.

Noting that many hardcore daily fantasy sports players migrated from the online poker world, Chris Grove, managing director of gambling research firm Eilers and Krejcik, said serious players probably won’t shy away from traditional sports wagering.

“It almost doesn’t really matter if it’s sports-related or not,” he said. “Whatever the next thing is, they will move to where the money is. It may be cryptocurrency trading.”

Brian Pearson, a longtime daily fantasy player and founder of fantasy sports website Jackpot Fantasy concurred.

“The crossover will be everywhere,” Pearson said. “Players just love action. If they don’t like the (point) spread, maybe they throw down a lineup for the day. Maybe they are on a cold streak and need a change of pace. Options are always good.”

Whether that online action is allowed likely will come down to the specifics of the court’s ruling.

The New Jersey legislation being challenged by the NCAA and professional sports leagues would allow sports gambling at the state’s casinos and horse racing tracks, but doesn’t include online wagering.

If the court strikes down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act as unconstitutional, New Jersey and other states would be free to implement and regulate online and in-person sports gambling.

However, if the court rules more narrowly — leaving PASPA standing but allowing New Jersey to have sports gambling at casinos and racetracks — it could stall online gambling.

Online wagering “would likely require a finding that PASPA is unconstitutional,” said Wallach, an attorney with Miami, Florida-based Becker and Poliakoff.

Wallach added that New Jersey might be able to modify its legislation and tie its online sports gambling to existing online casino wagering platforms. The same could apply to other states like West Virginia that already have online gambling contained in their legislation.

“The big money from sports betting will be the online component,” former Democratic New Jersey state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, a driving force behind the state’s effort, said. “But we have to wait to see, if we win the case, how we win it.”

An Atlanta development company has purchased property in Pooler for a new industrial park geared to creating warehouse space in a tight market.

Capital Development Partners, Inc. announced Friday its has purchased the 197-acre parcel, located west of Pooler Parkway, off U.S. 80 on Wild Cat Dam Road. The park will be called Savannah Port Logistics Center.

The park will use 185 acres and feature 2.3 million square feet of space for lease with modern specifications, transload, cross-dock, high cube and trailer storage facilities, John Knox Porter, CEO for Capital Development said.

The sellers’ broker for the deal, Cliff Dales with Colliers International of Savannah, said the company will start the project with a half-million square foot building. The building will be expandable to over 1 million square feet.

Porter said the first phase of construction will begin April and will be on the Genesee &Wyoming Railroad Services, Inc. rail line servicing the port. It will be ready for occupancy April 2019. GWRR is a private rail company.

While the Savannah Economic Development Authority wasn’t involved in the deal, additional warehouse space is good for the area, Trip Tollison with the Savannah Economic Development Authority said.

“It is a great site and we are excited to have more inventory coming on to the market,” Tollison said.

At the end of 2017, industrial space in the area had an overall vacancy rate of just 2.9 percent.

Porter said the second phase of the project will include a 1,3 million square-foot build-to-suit facility, which will also be on rail. Construction is expected to begin on Phase II in late 2018.The industrial campus will offer transload capability and over 2,000 trailer storage positions.

“This is one of the largest and most significant development projects in the Southeast,” Porter said.

Porter pointed to the fast growing Savannah port as creating opportunities.

“The Panama Canal expansion, which opened in June 2016, can now accommodate ships carrying triple the number of 20-foot container units, which means more product is steaming toward distribution centers along the Atlantic seaboard,” Porter said.

Capital Development Partners, Inc. has offices in Atlanta, Savannah, Houston and New York. The company’s focus is on the strategic development of e-commerce, manufacturing, logistics and infrastructure facilities in the top U.S. growth markets.

Savannah Port Logistics Center and Capital Development Partner, Inc is financed with institutional financial partners including Greenfield Partners and GHA &Associates.

Porter said he and his company are excited about providing a need to Savannah.

“The port is nothing short of amazing,” Porter said. “Industrial land with good development fundamentals is extremely limited near the Port of Savannah. Savannah Port Logistics Center will meet the needs of national and global companies that are interested in import, export and using Savannah as a hub to service their clients.”

Savannah-based audio-visual company, Stage Front, held a special 40th birthday party on Thursday.

The company celebrated four decades in business — growing from a supply service to a multi-state production support and event services group.

For the business anniversary, the company provided a few gifts to local non-profit ministry Urban Hope.

Chase Nelson, a partner at Stage Front, said as part of the company’s anniversary year they wanted to give back to the community that has given them so much.

Stage Front staff gave employees a survey with a list of five area non-profits to choose from that the company would partner with throughout the year.

The choice was Urban Hope, which provides an after-school program, summer camp, Student Leader program and family night dinners for inner city first through eighth grade students. High school students can be part of the Student Leader program.

Nelson announced that Stage Front will not only partner with Urban Hope throughout the year with their time and resources, but will sponsor 10 children for Urban Hope’s summer camp.

Doug Carroll, head of the Urban Hope board, said his group is humbled by Stagefront’s generosity. Several students from the after-school program were invited to the celebration, where they had cake, cupcakes and soda.

“It’s incredible to get this support,” Carroll said. “That they would give of their time and resources is humbling.”

One of the original founders of Stage Front, Steve Stephens, said the company gives to many non-profits, but naming Urban Hope gives them a more definite focus. Stephens is company president. Steve’s brother Scott Stephens is also a partner in the company.

Nelson said while much has changed in the industry over the last 40 years for Stage Front, a number of things haven’t.

“One of the core values that really sticks out is help one another,” Nelson said. “To Stage Front, that means that we believe in the strengths of diversity, the bonds of community, the role of tolerance and the importance of sustainability.”

Stage Front over the years

Stephens said the company started in 1978 selling gear to night clubs and community theaters.

“Over time we figured out we needed to design and build,” Stephens said.

Today Stage Front has moved far beyond those days of selling theatrical lighting.

It offers production, support, presentation and event design services, serving the performing arts, corporate, regional government, education, worship, and military markets in the Southeast. In addition to Savannah, they have offices in Charleston, S.C., and Atlanta. They also have a presence in Nashville, Tenn.

Robert Hammond, a partner at the firm, said Stage Front frequently works with architects on design for audiovisual needs.

“We just did a massive concert venue along with video conferencing training rooms,” Hammond said.

Nelson said the corporate portion of their business is the fastest growing.

Another recent project for Stage Front is providing design and engineering services for 65 dental schools.

Stage Front currently has 84 full-time employees with about half of those in Savannah.

Nelson and Hammond both said plans are to have about 100 employees in the near future.

By STAN CHOE

Associated Press

NEW YORK — All politics may be local, but investors around the world still need to care about them.

There are high-stakes elections on the calendar this year beyond the midterm elections for the United States, including several across emerging markets, stretching from South America to Asia. Regardless of how the results pan out, emerging-market stock and bond funds may swing widely in the interim following their stellar and nearly uniformly upward ride in 2017.

Higher highs and lower lows are nothing new for emerging-market funds, which invest in stocks and bonds from China, Brazil and other developing countries. These economies are growing at a faster pace than the developed world, which can mean bigger profit possibilities for their companies and higher yields for their bonds. They also have a history of crashing more than the U.S. market when trouble strikes, such as during the 2008 financial crisis.

Many investors, though, may have taken their first step into emerging markets recently and experienced only the good times. Last year was an exceptional one, and emerging-market stock funds returned an average of 34 percent. That towered over the roughly 22 percent return for S&P 500 index funds.

The eye-popping figures helped convince investors to pour more than $50 billion into emerging-market stock funds during 2017, just two years after they pulled more money out of such funds than they put in, according to Morningstar.

Those investors got a reminder of the potential volatility in recent weeks, when emerging-market stock funds lost just as much as S&P 500 index funds during the sell-off in late January and early February, even though the trigger for the market’s fear was an economic report out of the United States.

For this year, much attention is on elections coming up in Brazil and Mexico, which are two of the larger components of many emerging-market funds. Together, they make up about 10 percent of the MSCI Emerging Markets index.

In Mexico, the front-runner in the July election for president is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Some investors worry that a Lopez Obrador victory could lead to a rollback of market-friendly policies or of more acrimonious negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Concerns are also high that Brazil’s presidential election could hinder efforts to reform the country’s pension system and make other fiscal changes. Brazil only recently emerged from a punishing recession.

Investors have gone back and forth in recent years on whether it’s worth caring about politics. Last year, the answer seemed to be “no,” as markets registered only minor hiccups when Catalonia declared independence from Spain and rhetoric got heated between nuclear-armed North Korea and the United States. The year before that, though, politics mattered when the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union shook markets around the world.

Even with the increased possibility of election-related turbulence, many fund managers say they remain optimistic about the prospects for emerging markets. Emerging economies are in better fiscal shape than they were before prior downturns, and their stock and bond markets are typically less expensive than markets in the United States. U.S. markets have led the world for years, which has many investors calling foreign markets more attractively priced.

Plus, the gap between the developed and emerging worlds may be slimming when it comes to how much of a risk politics can play. In the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, one of the main causes for anger is the growing inequality between the rich and everyone else.

In the emerging world, the opposite is happening, said Samy Muaddi, portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price. Middle classes are expanding in many emerging markets, with wages rising and more people owning property.

“Our expectation is for pockets of volatility on an idiosyncratic basis around these events, rather than a wholesale sea change of volatility,” said Ben Robins, portfolio specialist at T. Rowe Price.

Some fund managers have already made moves based on similar expectations.

“What really surprises markets is uncertainty, things we don’t know anything about,” said Rick Schmidt, portfolio manager at Harding Loevner. “With elections, we know they’re coming. We don’t know the outcome, we don’t know what’s going to happen with NAFTA, but a lot of that risk has already been factored into the market.”

He pared back on his investments in Mexico last year, for example. And if the election does lead to a drop in prices, he said he’s more likely to see that as a buying opportunity.

“There’s always volatility, that’s what emerging markets is about,” Schmidt said. “We don’t try to predict it, but we love to try to react to it when it happens, because we have a whole roster of businesses that we’d love to own at better prices.”

Last week, the Metropolitan Planning Commission rejected staff recommendations and approved zoning amendments that would allow the Foram Group to move ahead with Starland Village, an intensive, mixed-use development along Bull Street between 37th and 39th streets.

Starland Village now moves before Savannah City Council, which seems likely to approve the new development standards tailored to the specific lots that Foram controls, including the surplus city property at the northwest corner of Bull and 38th streets.

This is a big story for the Bull Street corridor, in part because the current dispute also reflects common Savannah narratives.

There’s the typical development narrative. A developer sees a valuable parcel but wants to use the property more intensively than current zoning allows. Some residents might support changes, but a core group of neighborhood residents speaks out against the new zoning at meeting after meeting. The developer wins (usually).

And there is also the parking narrative, which is sometimes a story within the development story but often takes on a strange and contradictory life of its own.

In the standard Savannah parking narrative, investors insist that we need to loosen off-street parking requirements, while some residents and business owners argue for existing or even stricter requirements.

Meanwhile, more progressive voices want to focus our civic attention on forms of transportation that have been so marginalized in our car-dependent culture that they fall under the umbrella of “alternative transportation” — transit, bicycling, walking, ride-sharing and so forth. Still others point to cities that seem to have successfully dispensed with off-street parking requirements entirely.

The parking narrative then fractures into multiple arguments, and we lose sight of the specific issues at hand.

Parking requirements in Thomas Square

Since local officials have never adopted the broader zoning overhaul that professional planners spent many years crafting, we have wildly inappropriate parking requirements in many Savannah neighborhoods.

But not in Thomas Square, where rules were changed dramatically with the adoption of the Mid-City rezoning in 2005. I live next to four small commercial properties and three residential condominiums, none of which are required to have off-street parking.

Sure, the activity next door has increased parking demand on my block, but things work out fine.

Yes, parking pressure will increase as investment moves into the neighborhood, but on-street parking demand should not generally be difficult to address under the existing development standards.

In the case of Starland Village, however, local officials seem prepared to allow much more intense development, including a large music venue that will strain the on-street parking inventory.

As currently designed, Starland Village will have two significant parking structures. One will be along DeSoto Avenue attached to the rear of a new multi-family residential building that faces Bull Street. The other will be a standalone garage along 38th between DeSoto Avenue and Whitaker Street.

Current neighborhood zoning requires that the ground floor of parking structures be wrapped in other uses, but the language adopted by the MPC will exempt Foram’s parking garage from this requirement. So we are going to end up with a dedicated parking garage at the end of a residential block of Whitaker Street. This is not good urban design.

In any case, the new off-street parking will not address all the demand created by Starland Village. Some residents will choose to park on the street rather than in the garages, many patrons of new businesses will arrive by car and big concerts could draw a few hundred vehicles to nearby streets.

The problems will be complicated by the fact that several nearby blocks do not have lanes or have developed in ways that leave residents without off-street parking.

Being proactive rather than reactive

At a recent neighborhood meeting, Sean Brandon with the city of Savannah said that officials would be more proactive than they were when SCAD opened Arnold Hall, which overnight created intense demand for on-street parking on the blocks closest to the school.

Each day, many dozens of students walk to the classroom building, use the college’s shuttle system or ride bikes, but some blocks are still inundated with cars when school is in session.

Over time, a variety of measures have been implemented to lessen the impacts of such intense demand and provide more reliable parking for nearby residents, businesses and the Bull Street Library, but the city will need to plan better for the parking demand created by Starland Village.

For example, we will probably need to designate some spaces and perhaps entire blocks for resident parking only. That’s a step that could hurt nearby businesses and erode the character of the neighborhood, but such measures will be necessary if local officials approve development that is out of scale with historical patterns.

If they work together in advance, city officials and neighborhood residents can mitigate some of the likeliest parking problems, but the situation will get worse if more intense development becomes the norm in the neighborhood.

City Talk appears every Tuesday and Sunday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, Ga. 31401.

Comcast donates $75,000 to food bank

Comcast presented a check for $75,000 to America’s Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia this week in support of the regional food bank’s work during Hurricane Irma.

Established in 1981, America’s Second Harvest of Coastal Georgia is a locally inspired, volunteer-driven nonprofit food bank and community partnering organization. Second Harvest provides food to tens of thousands of children, senior citizens, low-income families, and people with disabilities who are at risk for hunger throughout communities in southern Georgia.

The organization partners with 285 faith-based and nonprofit agencies to provide emergency food assistance across Coastal Georgia communities.

Perry Lane Hotel hosts hiring event

The Perry Lane Hotel and Emporium Kitchen + Wine Market on Drayton Street will be hosting a three-day hiring event at the Eckburg Auditorium at Savannah Technical College at 5717 White Bluff Rd.

The events will be held noon to 8 p.m. Monday; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. The hotel has 240 full- and part-time positions ranging from hourly to management.

Howard Dental funds children’s program

Howard Family Dental Foundation, the charitable foundation of a dental office group based in Coastal Georgia and South Carolina, donated $30,000 to St. Joseph’s/Candler Foundations. The money will be used to provide support, education and guidance to children and teens with a family member facing a life-threatening disease through the Howard Hand in Hand Support Program.

Howard Family Dental Foundation representatives Dr. John C. Howard Jr. and Dr. Julie Howard presented the check during a team annual summit. Dr. Howard Zaren, Marti Barrow and Skye Cossio of St. Joseph’s/Candler were on hand for the check presentation and have been instrumental in the implementation of the program.

The donation comes as the third contribution of their $150,000 pledge to the program. This free program will help children cope with and process their thoughts and feelings — often fear, sadness, anger, confusion — about how life has changed for them and their families because of illness or disease.

Savannah Sport &Wellness expands to new location

Savannah Sport &Wellness, a locally-owned fitness and wellness training studio, has recently expanded to a new location at 2110 E. Victory Drive.

The company is a locally-owned health and fitness studio focused on data-driven, individualized training programs.

Savannah Sport &Wellness is open 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday by appointment. Weekend appointments are available upon request.

The Landings gets sustainable certification

The Landings has received designation as the first Certified Sustainable Community in Georgia by Audubon International.

The decision to pursue certification as a Sustainable Community was made in 2013 as a project of Skidaway Audubon with support from The Landings Association and The Landings Club. A steering committee has guided the process with resident volunteers, staff, and professionals, including those from UGA Marex and the Skidaway Island State Park.

The Landings Community was started 46 years ago by the Branigar Corporation. The Marshwood section was the first to be developed. In 1972, the covenant documents for The Landings were established to control the building types and land use as development moved forward.

On Saturday afternoon, I biked from my home in Thomas Square to the WW Law Center at 909 E. Bolton St., just a couple of blocks off Waters Avenue.

The trip takes just a few minutes by bike, but the sense of distance is heightened by the longstanding racial and economic divides that separate so many neighborhoods in Savannah.

The raised railroad tracks between East Broad Street and Atlantic Avenue even create a physical barrier splitting the Victorian and Eastside neighborhoods. The tracks disrupt the street grid in several places, which heighten the power of the dividing line.

I have been writing often recently about increased investment in the historic Thomas Square neighborhood north of Victory Drive. The former lines are breaking down, and we are seeing the benefits and drawbacks of rapid gentrification in areas that had recently faced years of disinvestment.

We haven’t seen the same type of aggressive investment in the Eastside, although the neighborhood is attracting many new residents and has had significant developments in recent years, including improvements to the sidewalks and streetscape along Waters Avenue.

But the Eastside feels like it’s on the cusp of more rapid change, and we need to be better prepared for the challenges than we have been in some other neighborhoods near the downtown core.

I ended up spending about two hours at the WW Law Center on Saturday talking to national urban design experts who were volunteering for the East Savannah Legacy Project, an effort of the Congress for the New Urbanism in advance of the organization’s 26th annual convention in May (https://www.cnu.org/cnu26).

Another CNU design team spent much of the weekend considering ways to introduce a walkable, mixed-use node of activity on Savannah’s Southside. Yet another team has been working in Brunswick.

Similar CNU projects in previous host cities have a surprisingly high rate of implementation. Essentially, simply by hosting the organization’s convention, Savannah is getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in design services from experts in housing, architecture, landscape architecture, traffic engineering and other related urban design fields.

And we will be getting all sorts of other direct and indirect benefits before, during and after CNU, which runs from May 15 to 19. CNU members will be spending a lot of their time learning about Savannah’s unique urban design legacy, and we will have opportunities to learn from them.

As the regional population grows and traffic pressures increase, we might need to rethink our standard approaches to public policy if we want to guarantee high quality of life for as many residents as possible.

In upcoming columns, I’ll be taking a much closer look at the recommendations for the Eastside and Southside.

City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, Ga. 31401.

Coming off a strong 2017, Savannah area home sales continued that momentum to usher in 2018 with 382 homes selling across Bryan, Chatham and Effingham counties during January, according to data recently released by Savannah Multi List Corp.

January is typically a slower month for sales and while year-over-year sales dipped about six percent the year-over-year average price increased nearly $20,000 to $212,700, which provided some padding in the market.

“We started 2018 with a solid start despite decreasing units and a slight drop in sales volume. The increase in sales price by 10 percent has minimized the impact of this in our market,” said Janet Howard, 2018 president of the Savannah Area Realtors, a local industry group.

January sales volume was the second highest on record since 2013. Despite decreasing $772,708 compared to January 2017, unit sales brought in $93,164,153 across the three county area.

The Georgetown area (Zip code 31419) took the top spot for both sales volume and units sold last month with 56 homes bringing in $10,330,839 in sales volume. Richmond Hill area (31324) had the second highest number of unit sales with 38 homes selling followed by Pooler with 34.

Inventory across the area, which had dipped to under five months at the end of 2017, was at 7.16 months in January, the lowest January on record since 2013. A healthy market typically hovers five to six months of inventory, though it’s not unusual to see an increase during the first few months of the year. Coming off the low numbers of last year a slight increase in inventory is a welcome sight.

“Ultimately we would love to see an increase in our inventory to allow balance in these numbers and allow for more choice to what we believe will be an increase in first time home buyers,” Howard said.

“The interest rates, though they have increased, are still attractive and buying still seems sensible when compared to the rental rates.”

Looking ahead to the rest of the year Howard expects the market to continue its steady growth.

“Our industry continues to monitor factors believed to influence the market such as tax reform and additional increases in the interest rates that could potentially be disruptive,” she said.

“All in all, we are satisfied with the results in the Savannah market and look forward to continued growth in our area.”

National sales

Nationwide, January existing-home sales home dipped for the second month in a row and had their biggest decline on an annual basis in three years, according to the monthly report released by the National Association of Realtors.

“The utter lack of sufficient housing supply and its influence on higher home prices muted overall sales activity in much of the U.S. last month,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist.

“While the good news is that Realtors in most areas are saying buyer traffic is even stronger than the beginning of last year, sales failed to follow course and far lagged last January’s pace. It’s very clear that too many markets right now are becoming less affordable and desperately need more new listings to calm the speedy price growth.”

Total housing inventory at the end of January increased four percent to 1.52 million existing homes, which is still about nine percent lower than a year ago. Nationwide inventory has fallen year-over-year for 32 consecutive months.

The northeast, Midwest, west and the south all experienced a decline in sales during January. In the south the decrease was about one percent to an annual rate of 2.26 million homes. The median price for a home in the south increased four percent compared to a year ago to $208,200.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Allegiant Air today announced new nonstop service from Nashville, Tennessee to Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport beginning June 8.

The airline is offering introductory fares as low as $45 with some restrictions. More information, flight days, times and fares prices can be found at Allegiant.com.

“We’re very excited to grow again in Savannah,” said Lukas Johnson, Allegiant senior vice president of commercial.

“There is great demand for travel between these beautiful cities, and we’re sure that folks will take advantage of our convenient, ultra-low cost, nonstop service to enjoy all that Music City has to offer.”

The new seasonal route will operate twice weekly and expand on the service Allegiant currently operates to Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, bringing the total number of Allegiant routes to Savannah to 10.

“Securing nonstop service to Nashville has been an objective of ours for several years,” said Greg Kelly, executive director of Savannah Airport Commission.

“We appreciate Allegiant giving us the opportunity to show that this route, our tenth with Allegiant, will be successful. The ongoing collaboration with our air service development partners continues to pay dividends.”

Stephen Green, chairman of Savannah Airport Commission said the new service, which is expected to bring nearly 11,000 additional visitors to the area, is a big win for the region.

“We applaud Allegiant’s decision to include Savannah/Hilton Head as one of the first airports for its new Nashville service,” Green said.

“The residents of our region can now enjoy convenient, affordable and quick access to one of the great entertainment destinations in the U.S. At the same time, it will provide direct access to the Savannah/Hilton Head region to the entire Nashville metropolitan area with over 1.7M residents.”