We’ve all read stories in the national press about how the real estate bubble has burst, there is a mortgage crisis, and prices are dropping. While this is true in some markets, it is important to remember real estate markets are local. There are areas that will show significant growth and appreciation even while national trends are down.
Two weeks ago we got some hard numbers when we crunched the Q2 results for all of Center City. We found that sales and prices up. (You can see the full Q2 report here.) If you have been waiting for the market to fall further it might be time to rethink that as it looks like the market hit bottom and prices are beginning to rise.
Further evidence Center City’s real estate’s market strength was recently published by the Philly Inquirer. One trend that has been dragging down prices is the subprime mortgage market. Now subprime mortgages aren’t neccessarily bad things, but in certain markets they have been over used and are now defaulting at high rates. Luckily this is not the case in Philadelphia where the Inquirer reports that Center City has an extremely low subprime mortgage rate of less than 4%. See http://www.philly.com/inquirer/multimedia/The_Subprime_Landscape.html. With low subprime penetration there is low risk of a market decline due to owner defaults.
[...] been arguing for months that the Philadelphia market is stronger than the press makes you believe. We were able to prove [...]
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