Ten Sizzling Real Estate Markets

Forbes:

Home prices nationwide posted their biggest drop in 16 years last month, according to the National Association of Realtors.

But someone forgot to tell the folks in Salt Lake City. There, the median home sale price jumped 21% in the second quarter this year, versus the same period last year.

It's not that Salt Lake City is entirely immune to the national housing downturn. In fact, new housing permits are down this year, and there is a glut of Macmansions, says John Taylor, investment specialist at Commerce CRG, a unit of developer Cushman & Wakefield. But with more people moving into the area, thanks in part to a percolating job market, demand for affordable existing homes is still healthy, while commercial construction is up 40% from last year. Apartment vacancy rates are less than 2%, and longtime residents worry about a land grab from commercial property investors flocking in from California and Las Vegas

Read the whole story: Forbes

Comments

[VivaZapata]

forbes' list of sizzling markets comes with caveats. most of these places are areas that had stagnant realty markets but suddenly, and perhaps because of, they offer employment. wait. maybe people would choose to live near an oil refinery. perhaps the oil companies offer gas masks to local residences. Salem, Oregon is one exception to the undesirable list. sounds nice.

[EinChicago]

Shhhhhh. No good news allowed, remember. The far fringe loonies will collapse if there is any sign of a turnaround.

In all seriousness, we do seem to have reached the apex of panic and the bandwagon has quietly turned around. While the public and media, who tend to be about 6 months behind the facts and usually just report on what the bandwagon looks like from the distance, gnash and grind our teeth in a veritable bacchanalian frenzy, a lot of teh big players are quietly bargain hunting. I have a friend at one of the major commercial real estate management companies in the country, based out of Denver, and after being pretty much dead for most of the last part of 2006 and the first 7 month sof 2007, she is insanely busy right now as they are buying up properties at a rate she hasn't seen in her 9 years at the company. The bargain hunting has begun, and the savvy buyers with the means to do so will be quietly pillaging the real estate market in the winter/spring and by teh time teh media gets around to repsonding and noticing, it will already be too late because teh vultures will have taken the prime meat and only left scraps.

[bmermaid]

Who would want to live in Salt Lake City?

No thanks! I'd rather live in where at least the climate is nice, even if it's not LA or NYC.

[wadenelson1]

Hint: you'd really want to check out Farmington NM before you decided to move there.

[curiousasheck]

Scams Away!