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


 

Listing and Buying in the Shadow of Yale

In most national real estate publications, you will read that people buy in the spring and move in the summer. This is largely tied to the school calendar, and buyers want their children to get settled before the new school year starts.  If you back that up, the best time to list a property would therefore be late March or April.  That also coincides, in the Northeast, with better weather for open houses and showings in April and May.

There are some deviations from that, even in our area.  For example, Branford has a big supply of condos, and only 1 in 30 units sends a child to the public schools.  Thanks in large part to the big proportion of condos, there is a relatively smaller pool of single-family homes, and so a lower percentage of spring sales and summer closings. Since condos are often investment properties, and since investments are influenced heavily by tax considerations, we see a jump in condo closings in the last quarter of the year, in part for tax reasons, and partially just because there isn't a school-based reason to prefer summer.

Yale is, of course, the region's biggest employer.  Therefore, the Yale calendar is very important in the decision of when to buy and sell, especially in New Haven and closely contiguous towns.  While offers are made to new employees year-round, and while promotions and local hires can occur at any time, we see a big uptick after the first of the year, especially with the Medical School and Hospital, where July 1st is a traditional starting date.  This moves the optimal time to list up into late January or February, even though there can be weather issues in those months.

If you are a local buyer, therefore, you should consider buying before you have to compete with Yale buyers on short time frames.  In case you haven't done the math on that, you need to be buying now!

Listings Flying Off the Shelf

After a long, long, long winter, we're seeing signs of spring! And that includes the spring market. I'm starting to get lots of calls from people connected to Yale, who've gotten their job offers and are beginning to look for housing here. We are entering lots of new listings into the system--several dozen in New Haven alone last month. And, at long last, some of the suburban inventory is moving. I heard last week that a spate of sales in Pine Orchard has reduced the available inventory drastically. Even things that have been for sale for a very long time have gone on deposit. That's good news for sellers, who have been consoling themselves with the thought that nothing was selling, while they sat with their houses unsold. If they aren't going now, it's time to re-examine the price, because we're experiencing a boost that should help everyone. And it's about time!

Statistics from the Region

It's tempting to make you all guess about market trends for 2010, but it would be hard for me to collect the responses in a timely way, so I guess I will just tell you. The latest Commercial Record shows that, for year over year sales from 2009 to 2010, New Haven County as a whole was down almost 8% in the number of sales. For the immediate towns, Guilford, Madison, North Haven, and Bethany had an increase from the prior year. Guilford and Madison were each up 9%, while the other two had smaller increases.

Surprisingly, the median prices were almost identical in 2009 and 2010, with 2010 coming in at 0.8% less. I expect that most of you would have guessed that prices fell about 10%, so the fact that they actually fell less than one percent is very good news. Of course, as I've often pointed out, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, so it's probably true that only the best houses sold, meaning that most homes would have sold for less in 2010 than in the prior year. As I've discussed in earlier posts, East Rock and Spring Glen did go up in price, showing the "Yale" effect most strongly. North Branford, with 24% fewer sales, had an increase of 10%, and Milford, Wallingford, and Woodbridge had smaller increases. New Haven as a whole crept up 1%.

It is important to recognize, as the issue said in another article, that this is the sixth year in a row that sales have declined. Since prices have also been declining for most of that period, the total decline is larger than what is listed for last year. And, since most homeowners looking to sell haven't been in the market for some time, those yearly decreases can really add up.

However, the fact that we are not in freefall is very good news, and the spring is still ahead of us. Anything could happen, but we're hoping for recovery mode to kick in strongly!

Who Would Have Thought It?

If someone had told us twenty years ago that the center city's residential properties would be holding value better than those in the suburbs--better even than direct waterfront--we probably would have scoffed. It's clear right now that the hot market is New Haven--the closer to downtown, the better.

This isn't by accident. President Levin of Yale, who has been in office for fifteen years, lived in New Haven for many years before he became Yale's leader (and, in fact, has continued to live in his own home, rather than the one that Yale provides). He has made it clear that he would be happy if every new hire lived there as well. The last time that I heard, 47% of Yale's senior faculty lived within the city limits. In today's New Haven Advocate, the stated equivalents of New Haven's municipal police and firefighters were 13% and 17%. Yale's showing clearly represents the payoff of a long-term strategy.

There is another factor at work, however. Current demographics favor the central city, although this is a change from earlier generations. Young professionals have always preferred urban life, but now, increasingly, so do empty nesters. The arts, the dining, the conveniences, and the lack of commuting time have all contributed to make New Haven a popular housing choice. Even those with school-age children, if those children attend one of the city's prestigious private schools, have been moving into the city neighborhoods.

And that's all good news for the region, since a vibrant city makes for healthier suburbs.

New Haven is hot!

I'm looking at the figures for June and July in our New Haven office, and they're great! We sold as many units in those two months as we did year-to-date through May, and the two months together were 50% over June and July of last year in both units and volume! This week was the best week they've had in at least two years. What's particularly surprising is that it's happening in what is usually a very slow month, and finally hot and humid to boot. Maybe all the hype about hitting bottom is old news, and we're on the way up!

The Case-Shiller index for last month also showed a halt in the decline of prices, and it corroborates my earlier paragraph. We are also finding our Wallingford Regional office to be running ahead of last year in sales, so it's not just New Haven (although Yale continues to be a driving force in the local real estate market).

I was at the Lexus dealer yesterday, and Dave McDermott and I had a friendly argument as to whose business was worse this year. He has trouble with my argument that at least he has his excellent service department to bring in revenues. Dave says that customers want to buy, and that credit is the issue. I'd say we're both in much the same situation, although, if he reads this blog, he's going to think we're in clover now. I wish...

Market Spike?

We're experiencing a late, late spring market surge, even though it's July. Our New Haven office has posted record sales for the past six weeks, and all offices seem flat out, despite the signs that summer has finally come. The New Haven numbers are still largely driven by Yale, and we hope that continues. All offices say that the strongest activity is in the FHA mortgage range (under $387,500 for a mortgage), and in first-time homebuyers. Lower price ranges, except again near Yale, move much faster.

Our hope for first-time buyer interest is that the national unemployment rate starts to go down. As the parent of twenty-somethings, I hear many stories of lost jobs, postponed starts, and pay cuts. While it may be slightly older people who go into the real estate market, the "last in, first out" theory of human resource layoffs has many newer workers nervous. When they, and their parents, start feeling more secure about their future job prospects, more of them will jump in at these low interest rates.

If we're brave enough to wish for anything else, we're keeping our fingers crossed that sellers understand the fragility of the current market, and respond reasonably and positively to negotiations and problems that occur along the way to the closing. It may be the general national stress level, but I hear a lot of stories about sellers who just won't compromise, even when it's in their interest to do so. Good thing our agents are so talented!

Commercial Real Estate Update

It's worth a mention about what's happening in the commercial real estate arena these days. The answer is: nothing. The nation's banking woes, and the resulting credit crunch, have brought most real estate transactions to a screeching halt. Traditionally, there is a lag between the residential market performance and the commercial market performance of about nine to twelve months. I had an interesting discussion yesterday with an economist running buddy as to why this should be so, but it has been consistent over the past recessions as well. One might think that jobs and business profits would decline before housing sales, but it's usually the other way around. Residential sales can be predicted if you know personal income numbers, interest rates, and the consumer confidence index. Commercial real estate has more to do with credit, GNP, tax structure, and general business cycles, yet they do coincide and overlap this way.

Given the current state of the economy, pundits are not forecasting an improvement in commercial real estate this year. New Haven is lucky that so much of our space is occupied by Yale, but even mighty Yale has seen the effects of this market cycle, so we may not be as protected as we might otherwise have been. Our best protection is coming from a lack of new product, meaning that we don't have the see-through office buildings sitting empty, the way we did in the last recession. One of the worst problems is that there has been a fundamental shift in the way people work, causing companies with the same revenues to need less office space. That may not change back when the economy improves. Other new companies will have to spring up to take that space, and Connecticut's cost and tax structures have caused it to be at or near the bottom of new business creation. In our area, biotech has made our regional results somewhat better, but we should all do what we can to attract corporations and jobs to our region.