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By Scott Nicholson
With national housing start-ups reaching their lowest level in
more than a decade and home sales declining,
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The U.S. Commerce Department reported
the sales of new single-family homes declined 2.8 percent
in January, though area Realtors say the High Country’s
market is “immune to natural trends.” Photo
by Mark Mitchell
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the local market is seasonally cool but not in hibernation.
Chris Coley, Realtor with ERA Properties and president of the
Watauga-Avery Association of Realtors, said although the local
market had slowed a little, it wasn’t far off from the historic
sales pace. “If you look at the market listings of closings
and what’s under contract, there might be slightly less activity
compared to last year, but I attribute that more to the weather.
A dip tends to happen during election years, also, because people
are waiting to see what will happen.”
The U.S. Commerce Department reported last week that sales of
new single-family homes declined 2.8 percent in January to a seasonally
adjusted annual rate of 588,000 housing units, the slowest pace
since February 1995.
Coley said the High Country had its own home market that was in
many ways immune to national trends because of the rarity of the
property and the reasons people bought homes in the mountains.
“It’s not really different from other industries,”
Coley said. “Our slow times are good by most other areas’
standards. We might level off but then we pick back up.”
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) is lobbying for
home-buyer tax credits as part of a national economic stimulus
package, figuring construction and home sales would help jump
start the economy, particularly with home sales being one of the
key indicators of economic health.
The NAHB says people still believe in the American Dream, though
they are a bit hesitant to sign mortgage papers.
“Our latest surveys reveal that builders are seeing greater
traffic of prospective buyers through their model homes than in
previous months, yet this has yet to translate to any improvement
in actual sales activity,” NAHB chief economist David Seiders
said. “It stands to reason that policy measures to stimulate
housing demand could be a powerful force and help bring about
a housing and economic recovery.”
The Southern home market is still a little stronger than most.
Three out of four national regions posted lower new-home sales
in January, with a 10.3 percent decline reported in the Northeast,
a 7.6 percent decline reported in the Midwest and a 2.4 percent
decline reported in the South. The West posted a 2.2 percent gain
for the month, following a large decline in December.
Coley said the number of visitors to his Web site shows people
are still as interested in mountain homes as ever, and fluctuations
in the interest rates may lead people to wait in hopes of a better
mortgage deal.
“There’s a lot of speculation and uncertainty,”
he said. “It causes people to break their spending habits.
When there’s talk of the interest rate dropping, people wait
to see what happens.”
The construction slowdown has not yet made a major impact on available
homes, as more older homes absorb that share of the market and
newer homes tend to sit longer before they are sold. The inventory
of new homes for sale nationally was down 2.2 percent in January,
while the average completion or sale time of new homes was 9.9
months, the longest period since April 1982. The median length
of time that completed homes were on the market was 6.7 months
in January, up from 6.2 months in December and 4.8 months a year
earlier.
Coley said there were no real local trends on whether condominiums,
single-family or second homes were more or less popular than before.
He did note that single-family homes in a reasonable price range
didn’t last long on the market.
“When the day comes that you can put something deemed ‘affordable
housing’ on the market, and that doesn’t get snatched
up, that would be an indicator of a slowdown,” Coley said.
“What separates us is the elevation. There are really only
three counties where you can live above 3,000 feet and get that
climate. That really makes us like an island. I’ve always
looked at it like ocean-front property, because of that kind of
scarcity.”
Coley also believes each mountain property is unique, which makes
appraisal something of an art and pricing a matter of experience.
Because not all the land is buildable, it adds a premium to the
areas that can be developed.
Existing home sales have slipped nationwide, including single-family,
townhouses, condominiums and cooperative housing units. They declined
0.4 percent in January to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of
4.89 million units from an upwardly revised level of 4.91 million
in December. Existing-home sales were 23.4 percent below the 6.44
million-unit pace in January 2007.
That decline occurred despite a dip in mortgage rates to 5.76
percent last month, nearly half a percentage point below what
they were a year ago. The national median existing-home price
for all housing types was $201,100 in January, with single-family
homes averaging $198,700. About 4.2 million homes are available
for sale nationwide.
However, Coley said the national trends would take a while to
trickle down to local realty.
“People buy mountain property because they want to, not because
they have to,” he said. “We’ve got our own little
market. All real estate is local.”
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