Not EVERYONE Thinks The World is Coming to an End

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), home sales were up nationally 2.9% in February compared to January, while still down more than 25% from a year earlier. BUT, what most fail to point out is that 2007 was the fourth best year ever. Everything is relative.

In our area sales also rebounded in February in the three suburban counties and prices have held steady for the last 12 months, bucking national trends (those national trends largely influenced by what is going on in Florida, California, Las Vegas, and Michigan).

And this brings me to my point. There's an age old adage in real estate that goes, "all real estate is local" yet hardly anyone takes a minute to really point our, or actually figure out, that when they talk about the foreclosures and price declines and all the other bad economic news attributed to real estate, much of it is isolated to those four areas of the country, yet as it is repeated over and over and over again in the press, on TV and anywhere else that this kind of bad news can be sensationalized, it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Over the last 5-8 years what has kept the economy going has largely been consumer spending. As this negative news, not properly digested, has been regurgitated ad nauseum, it has done a LOT of damage to consumer confidence which is now at a very low level and is being reflected in many economic indicators.

The fact is that our area will see very little impact from the sub-prime fiasco and its fallout, yet consumers are being put into a state of frenzy, really for no good reason. Construction, even flips, are slowing down because investors are becoming fearful that they won't be able to sell them. For some strange reason there are less renters available for investors I'm also being told by property managers.

We live in a very artificial society. When the likes of Lenny Dykstra can go on financial TV and talk about a stock and have it triple in the matter of weeks, there's something really wrong with the way our markets work. With the world having shrunken so over the last 50 years and news being available in every conceivable medium as it happens, I've gotten to the point where I don't want to know all the bad things going on. What's the point? It is what it is. It doesn't affect my life unless I let it. People are letting it and without some overriding positive influence to help get us out of this spiral, well, maybe my mother was right....