A couple of thoughts …

No time to blog this week … working several new contracts and new clients.  I know the data says Austin-area sales are way off this year, but I can’t tell it from my practice.  There must be a BUNCH of agents trying to figure out where to find a prospect, because the agents I talk to regularly are at least as busy as they have been over the past couple of years, if not busier.

I just posted a couple of articles on my Local Market Information page (www.eHomesByMorris.com).  One was featured prominently in the print edition of today’s Austin American-Statesman, offering some optimism about new home starts in our area — up 17% from the 2nd quarter to the 3rd quarter of 2009.  By this evening, that article was impossible to find on Statesman.com, except by  searching the writer’s name, Shonda Novak.

Easy to find this evening on Statesman.com was a new post from the same writer about rising commercial vacancies in the Austin area. 

I don’t question the reality described in the second article.  I believe we will see a significant “correction” in commercial real estate markets over the next year.  Demand for office space in particular depends on employment growth, and nobody is predicting robust growth in the coming months, although Austin will undoubtedly be better off than most other U.S. metros.

What’s interesting to me is how quickly the vaguest good news disappeared.  Just a few hours after the “new home starts” article landed in my driveway, it was nowhere to be seen online.  Maybe it just got crowded out by developments later in the day, but to me it looks more like the old “bad news sells” dictum.  It’s really tiresome when there are so many great opportunities in our local real estate market.