SENECA — Home sales in the tri-county area that includes Oconee and Pickens counties fell more than 31 percent in the third quarter over the same period a year ago, new state housing statistics show.

The good news is that the state’s housing industry is near or at the bottom, Nick Kremydas, CEO of the South Carolina Realtors Association, said Wednesday. The bad news, he said, is that there is no telling how long local housing will be mired at the bottom before it begins to rise again.

According to Q3 results that take in July, August and September, tri-county real estate agents sold 801 properties, or 31.2 percent less than the 1,168 homes sold during the same period in 2007.

The tri-county market, which also includes Anderson County, suffered the third largest drop in home sales in the state behind Greenwood County

(-37.8 percent) and the Piedmont Regional market (-33 percent). The Piedmont market includes Beaufort, Jasper, Allendale, Barnwell, Colleton, Hampton, Orangeburg and Bamburg counties.

Statewide, home sales are down 23.1 percent over a year ago.

Despite the doom and gloom because of the teetering state of the national economy, Kremydas said there are signs that the worst might soon be over for South Carolina, which he said has been spared the brunt of the housing industry’s miseries.

He said that despite the housing slump, the median price of homes in South Carolina has slipped just 3 percent compared to high double-digit declines in the price of homes in many areas around the country.

For instance, the median price of Q3 homes sold in the tri-county area was $138,000 or 5.4 percent lower than the 146,000 median price a year ago. The median price is the mark at which half of the homes sell for less and the other half sell for more.

The median price of homes statewide is $155,000 or 3.2 percent less than a year ago.

Kremydas said that with interest rates at an historic low, and with U.S. Census Bureau statistics showing large numbers of Americans relocating to the Palmetto State since 2000, South Carolina remains well positioned to begin its climb out of the bottom in the third or fourth quarter of 2009.

“The industry is getting back to the fundamentals of real estate being a long-term investment,” Kremydas said. “It’s bringing sanity back. What we don’t know is how long we’ll be (at the bottom) before we go back up.”