Mixed Signals

The latest issue of the Commercial Record illustrates our current problem for sellers and buyers.  If you look at New Haven county for June, the most recent month available, compared to the same month last year, sales are down by 12% and prices for the whole county are up by almost 6%.  If you look just at the shoreline towns and add Woodbridge, to try to capture the higher end of the market, sales are slightly up and prices are down.  Go figure. 

I guess the lesson as a whole is that we can't pay too much attention to what we read in the national press.  Connecticut is following its own, slower, path to recovery.  Our listors at the high end of the market are beginning to accept that there seems to be a ceiling on prices for luxury homes, and that no one can say what a given home is "worth".  We can predict that it won't sell for what the seller thinks it should, given what money is in the house and what the condition is, but we can't find examples that will pinpoint the exact price.  We can't even promise that it will sell at a lower price, nor can we swear that we're not "making a market" by lowering prices, causing low prices to slip lower.  What can we say?  We can tell buyers that it's a great time to buy direct waterfront, or properties over a million dollars.

In other submarkets, the picture is murkier.  The numbers of months of supply in houses has declined, and is now in the range of a balanced market.  That should mean that neither seller or buyer has an advantage.  But, depending upon where you are, and the type of house you have, you could find a bidding war or few showings, with maybe a lowball offer.  However, the only way to test the market is to put the property on at a "fair" price and see. 

There is a bump every fall, when buyers try to close and move before the end of the year, and, this season, it may tell the final tale of 2013.  Let's see what happens.  We do know this--mortgage rates, over the long run, matter much more than a few thousand dollars here or there in the sales price.  So buyers should definitely act, because interest rates have already gone up about 15% from their lowest point, and will likely rise further after the elections.  Time is fleeting--carpe diem!

Financial Times Article

Yesterday, I posted an article from Financial Times of London, comparing the New Haven market to the Cambridge, MA one.  We lost.  I thought it was not a fair comparison.  New Haven is a very different place--it's a center city, with suburbs around it.  Cambridge IS a suburb, of Boston.  It seems to me that that makes them very different, with many more low-income areas in New Haven. 

Having lived in both places, I don't find them as disparate as the article would make them appear.  Harvard has always had a very good PR image, and has managed to weather bad news without making as many headlines.  Most people would no more walk through Cambridge Common after dark than stroll across the New Haven Green.  Yet, somehow, the national media has always presented New Haven as a dangerous place in which to live or attend school, while Cambridge comes across as a trendy, high-end metropolis.  Granted, Yale has more high-crime areas within walking distance than Cambridge does, but the subway system in Boston has the potential to deliver crime there as well.  My old dorm had an incident a few years ago, where someone was killed after a student opened the gate for a "townie" (yes, Harvard now locks its gates as well). 

It is true that Cambridge has two major institutions--Harvard and MIT--compared to New Haven's Yale, and that the biotech spinoff effect is therefore twice as great.  It's also true that dual-career couples have a somewhat easier time both finding jobs in the Boston area (although New Haven offers the possibility of NYC).  Real estate values are indeed higher in Cambridge, especially since Massachusetts is undoubtedly further along in its recovery from the Great Recession.  Yet I would argue that both are residential hubs, with lively nightlife, lots of educational institutions, and plenty to do.  I would even give New Haven the edge in the arts, especially if you take Boston out of the equation.  There may be statistical truth to the article, but it presents a very one-sided look at the numbers, in my opinion.

US Property Sales: Harvard vs. Yale

Two cities home to Ivy League universities are strikingly different from each other

 

Harvard and Yale may be North America’s most famous universities but the east coast home cities of these two “Old Ivies” could barely be more different. Harvard is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an affluent and famously left-leaning locale, once named the US’s most liberal city in a study by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. It is nicknamed, not always admiringly, the “People’s Republic of Cambridge” and was the first city in the US to elect an openly gay, black man as mayor.Yale’s home is in New Haven, Connecticut, a city that has earned the unfortunate reputation of being one of the most crime-ridden and ghettoized in the US.

By Ruth Bloomfield of the Financial Times, click here to continue reading


 

Brand New Q Bridge

People have been wondering what would happen to real estate sales along the Shoreline when the new bridge was finished.  We can now access most of the new capacity, and, although it's summer and fewer cars come in each morning, there is a definite difference in the traffic over the bridge.  In fact, on the way out, traffic tends to slow now either after Exit 51 in East Haven, or at Exit 54 in Branford.  The merge is still an issue coming south on I91, but it isn't really different from going toward NY at that point.  All in all, the traffic from the Shoreline is now comparable to that coming from every other direction, and is spread out over many days in the summer, instead of being crunched into a Friday afternoon window. 

It seems to me that people moving here from other places would no longer eliminate the Shoreline because of traffic, especially if their commutes are early in the AM.  One extra lane has made a big difference, and our backups seem minor compared to what most commuters face in other parts of the country and the world. 

This should also be combined with the addition of services along the Shoreline that didn't used to exist there, especially the recent proliferation of medical services in Guilford and points east.  Residents of the Shoreline now have access to emergency care without a lengthy drive, and can schedule most tests and much elective surgery within easy driving distance. 

Will we see a surge in buyers along the Shoreline?  Maybe so!