Real Estate Blog Asheville, NC

Hi everybody, it is been a couple of weeks since my last entry.  I haven’t written anything because I was waiting to see where all this economic turmoil is going.  The really short answer is nobody knows.  However, to expand upon that just a little bit I will share with you a conversation I had was some clients just the other day.

I was on a listing appointment with a residential client and they ask me my honest opinion of where things stood.  This wasn’t my verbatim response that it went something like this:

Currently our real estate market is suffering however since we are in Asheville, NC real estate market we’re not as bad off as say South Florida.  Primarily what we’re going to see in the market at least through the second quarter of next year are the bloodsuckers; defined as people with the ability to purchase at extremely discounted prices.  Somewhere moving into the third to fourth quarter of next year we should see a slight turnaround in the Asheville real estate market.  So, at the time we listed the property for one month during the fall, for leaf season, and then we will remove it for the winter.  We will then place it back on the market somewhere late spring to early summer of 2009.

However, after seeing what has happened over the past 72 hours and some of the conversations I have had makes me wonder if our turn around and slow painful recovery is not further out.  While our market in Asheville is surviving it is still starting to show some battle scars.  I honestly feel that this recent bailout OK OK not a bailout but a gov’t loan program will be hardly felt by main street.  The main benefactors of this move of course is wall street.  While the fed buying up all of these crappie assets provides money for the banks to start loaning money to each other it does nothing to make it available to the average Joe.  Let’s face it if you do not have a FICO score a ball of 700 and a job history that is long and illustrious YOU DO NOT STAND A CHANCE of getting a loan!!!!  So, while the overall economy may keep moving the future health and prospects for real estate in Asheville are going to be tight at least for the next year to year and a half.

However, the one bright spot in the real estate in Asheville is the green industry.  While conventional stick built construction and sales of preexisting homes seems to be slowing somewhat it appears as though healthy built/LEED certified homes are selling well.  So, the economic turn down is going to have some affect on the green industry, but I feel it will outperform the traditional real estate and construction industries by a long shot.

Brian