While on his morning neighborhood walk Bob commented “Good morning Frank. Did you hear that the Smith’s house finally sold?” And Frank replied, “yeah…and they only had to bring $17,000 to the closing!”
That is a quick snap shot of the Toledoarea real estate market. Home sale are on the upswing. In fact we just had the best first quarter in 5 years, but make no mistake,Toledo and many other badly hurt markets have a very long way to go.
The Brookings Institute MetroMonitor has said that the Toledo is among the Top 20 cities recovering from recession when it comes to manufacturing, the report says. Expansion at the Jeep plant and GM Powertrain have spurred jobs and have helped to provide stability in a very volatile jobs climate. The report did not take the 1,100 service jobs at the new Hollywood Casino which opens in May 2012 into account.
The jobs climate and housing markets go hand in hand. What I’m seeing tells me that we just may have found the bottom in the Great Recession and are beginning to make incremental improvements. To be sure, we will bump along the bottom for a while, but short of a worldwide disruption of crude oil or an all out mid-East conflict, we should be able to look back in years to come at 2012 and say that’s where the recover began.
Back to Frank and Bob…when asked for advise about buying and selling, I like to remind people that if they are selling at a lower price, that also means that they are likely buying at a lower price. It’s all relative. We have historically low interest rates, great housing inventories to select from and bargain basement pricing; Yes Frank and Bob, homeownership is on sale!
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