Local Real Estate Sales Continue to Impress
Yet another impressive report on Rochester area home sales. The article notes striong sales in Monroe County and the city of Rochester. I still firmly believe that the city will continue to pick up in prices and demand this year. As I've stated before, the housing prices in Rochester have been depressed for at least a decade, so the price increases are a natural adjustment. As a city resident, I also strngly believe some of this can be attributed to the new administration. There's been a palpable feeling of excitement and enthusiasm for the region - and people are starting to back that up with their dollars, not just their words. (For example, the closed Genesee Hospital was recently purchased and plans are to demolish and construct apartments, condos and commercial property in the city. The developers stated they wouldn't have considered the purchase unless they believed the city was undergoing a renaissance).
Rochester Real Estate
As a nice follow-up to an earlier article I wrote on the myopic reports of housing bubble bursts approaching, the local Rochester regional paper is reporting strong housing sales in the city of Rochester - even trending against slowing sales in the 11-county region of Western New York. Sales are up 9% over last year's record pace.
Keep in mind, this is an increase over the already high sales numbers from last year. It appears that my predictions were right (and the predictions that actually focused on most of America for CNN). In fact, Rochester is exceeding those numbers so far.
It's not particularly surpising given that interest rates continue to be historically low. The local economy appears to be on the uptrend, so sales should continue to be pretty hot. Suburban sales are slumping a little from last year - mainly because suburban homes are - and have been - priced reasonably well, not significantly undervalued.
The city is still priced quite well below national averages and under their true natural values. Crime and a stagnant economy held prices down in the bargain basement level for much of the city. Given the recent change in city administration, tehre's a palpable feeling of optimism for the city. The sales seem to be a good indicator that the optimism isn't shallow but is being backed up by actual investment by residents. I can only see high sales continuing for the short term - perhaps not at the current record pace, but certainly above the regional and historical rate. The only complications I see are:
- The increasing number of upscale luxury apartments - Corn Hill Landing, The Temple Building, and the East Ave apartment complexes. There's been a marked increase of upscale apartments in the city and even closer to downtown. Apparently there's been a pent-up demand though because these complexes are doing a good job of getting tenants. This is something that's been a bit baffling to me - Rochester has a dead downtown and a very hard time retaining 18-30 yr olds. So who is moving into these complexes?
- The increase of housing supply. The report didn't break down listings by city/region, but supply seems to be overtaking demand. Interestingly, the median and average home price continue trending up.
I think both fore-tell that sooner or later the simple laws of supply and demand will kick in and housing prices will stand still again. But I'd say that the city will outsell and outpace the region and the house prices we see today are still below true market value. If crime takes a significant drop or the economy really takes off locally, we'll see prices rise regardless of regional supply issues.
Real Estate predictions
CNN's Money/Business section has been running articles on the "real estate bubble" for quite some time now. Essentially they've been playing up the idea that the housing markets are about to burst and we'll see a long-term slowdown and even deflation in home prices. Here's the problem - their predictions really only apply to the hot, big markets - in California and Florida primarily. It'd be nice if they sprinkled in some optimism about the rest of the country amongst their predictions of housing Armageddon for Las Vegas and L.A. For those of you, who like me reside in Western New York there's a happy report from them in their latest gloomy chart. They expect markets like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo to continue the mild appreciation in home prices around the neighborhood of 6% (which is actually competitive with the current YTD returns of the S&P 500). Of course, if you ever compared our housing market to the true bubble areas like say - Stamford, CT - you already knew that. Our housing market has been relatively undervalued even in the majority of the most sought after areas - You can still find investment properties where the mortgage payments and rental income plus expenses compare nicely. The difference is that we're finally approaching the true house values here - whereas in the past the market tended to be very much undervalued (due to the local economy and crime rate which are finally trending positively again).
[If you're interested in more real estate related news, opinions and predications, please check out: Local Real Estate Sales Continue to Impress, Rochester Real Estate, More Real Estate Predictions, and Real Estate Predictions for 1Q 2007]
First Rochester Rails / Ruby Group Meeting
This past Thursday saw the very first meeting for the Rochester Ruby and Rails group. We met at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT, and had a significant RIT student and alumni contingent. As far as logistics go, it looks like we'll be meeting there regularly on the first and third Thursdays of each month starting up January 19th.
The group seems to be more dominated by those interested in Rails, but I'm hoping as we go along they'll want to learn more about the underlying langauge - after all, to get some of the significant gains in productivity they'll have to exploit language features like blocks and meta-programming. Happily, the format we decided on devotes time to two interactive discussion/presentations per meeting - one Ruby-language focused and the other Rails focused. It was a bit of a strange night - the Rochester area had a nice coating of slick ice (though I won't call it an "ice storm" because of the true Ice Storm when I was a kid. We lost power for two weeks!) - and almost no one brought their laptops. I suppose we all figured it was just our first meeting so it would be a meet and greet.
I'm also proud to say that the Rochester Ruby and Rails group has the entire RadRails development team as members as well as myself from the RDT developers. So we have a nice showing of ruby related eclipse experts ;)