Two national real estate stories caught my eye this morning. The first is from Realty Times and the second from RIS Media.
Both tout the nationwide rise in October sales, which mirrors the strong October sales numbers for Teton County reported here last week. Both also make sure to give most of the credit to the $8,000 first-time homebuyer’s tax credit originally set to expire Nov. 30. The credit has since been extended until April 2010 and expanded to include some current homeowners.
Note the regional breakdowns, however. While the specific sales increases overall and by region are different in each story (they do not compare apples to apples), both agree that the West is the region of the country that is lagging. In one story the West is down 5.1 percent in sales while rising 1.6 percent in the other.
To me the lack of national symmetry discounts to some degree the tax credit as a prime motivator. I give more credit to lower prices, very low interest rates and pent up activity from the dismal first two quarters of 2009.
I am also not surprised, and actually somewhat encouraged, by the underperformance of Western properties compared to the rest of the country. As a region we lagged behind the rest of the country when the market went down in 2008, so it follows we will lag in the recovery.
Hopefully this means Rocky Mountain real estate and Jackson Hole specifically will see similarly dramatic sales increases in the first quarter of 2010 as the rest of the country enjoyed in the last quarter of 2009. No matter what, it is pretty safe to predict the beginning of 2010 will easily outpace the first quarter of last year. From a blog post I wrote in May 2009:
“During the first three months of 2008 there were 67 transactions for a sales volume of approximately $100,000,000. In 2009 there were just 18 transactions for $43,000,000, a drop of 57 percent. Furthermore, in first quarter 2007 there were 139 transactions for a sales volume of $152,000,000!”
