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Iowa City Real Estate Checkup for Fall of 2009 – Q & A
1) The Current Condition of Real Estate in Iowa City? The residential real estate market, and as a following indicator, the commercial real estate markets are currently guarded, but healthy. Historically, for the last 20 years, or so, homes have increased in value by about 4% per year, have sold in 90-120 days and have sold for about 98% of what they were listed …
Jeff’s Gone GREEN!
GREEN. There is a lot of talk about GREEN these days. Green building, green living, green speech, green cars…so much I started to wonder what it really means to be GREEN, or to go GREEN. I got an email about a Realtor class offering a green designation. Well, I needed the CEU’s so I signed up thinking that I might actually learn …
Virtual Tours: A new tool for commercial real estate
Virtual tours are not really new, but the technology has improved to the point where they can be really useful. They’re a time saver for anyone looking at property listings online. Virtual tours have been used in residential listings for a few years, but I have not seen many for commercial listings. The property descriptions can be interesting, photos very helpful, but a virtual …
Recession…Iowa City Style
Yes, we are in a recession and boy am I sick of hearing that. Believe me, I know there are real problems with this economy, but the self fulfilling prophecy aspect of talking about it is another problem altogether. Let’s see what a recession actually means in Iowa City. I have tracked home sales prices in Johnson County since 1981. My method is …
Dare we hope?
I ran across this Case-Shiller housing index graph. We are all painfully aware of the current news with failing banks and failing countries! The Dow has lost almost 40% of its value this year and the housing market is taking the blame for it all. This chart shows the historic values from 1990 to the present, and as we know, the housing market across …
$700 Billion
I cannot even imagine how much money that is. The real question is will this bail out have the desired effect of liberating the commercial credit markets from non-performing, or under performing “sub prime” loans allowing them to start lending to banks and businesses. And will it happen soon. Another question without an answer is what are the long-term effects of this bail out. …
New year, new opportunities
Wow…have I been remiss in posting new material. The market has been so strange and difficult to predict that I just waited on the sidelines and watched the sales to see what was happening. It seems that sales are about the same in 2008 as they were in 2007. This is a good sign. Interest rates are creeping up to just under 7%. This …
Home sale prices off 10% for 2008
Yikes! Home prices for 2008 will be down 10% nation wide! Some markets like Miami are down almost 30%, followed by San Francisco which is down by 25%. Iowa City is somewhat insulated from national trends, but it not immune to the influence of national real estate trends.
New Demographic Reports
I have just posted new demographic reports for the Johnson County, Iowa area on my commercial website. Go to http://www.iowacitycommercialbroker.com/ and select the demographic tab. I love these reports. They offer in depth, current infomation about this area and give some sort of foundation for decision making.