If you’re wondering why the commercial real estate recovery seems to be such a slow — albeit fairly steady — one, look no further than the single-family housing market across the country. It’s still struggling. And as long as it continues to gasp, you can expect commercial real estate pros to work harder than ever to nab pieces of a painfully smaller pie of work.
There hasn’t been much good news lately when it comes to the single-family housing market. RE/MAX of Indiana, though, found some. And it should make commercial real estate pros happy (or at least as happy as they can expect to be in today’s sluggish economy).
Home sales in Central Indiana — an area that includes Indiana — experienced a solid July. According to the latest housing numbers released from RE/MAX of Indiana, the nine-county central Indiana area saw the sale of existing homes jump 26 percent in July when compared to the same month in 2010.
This increase was more impressive when compared to July home sales across the country. All U.S. home sales increased by 13 percent in July when compared to the same month one year earlier.
Even more impressively, especially for sellers, is that home prices in central Indiana actually rose. According to RE/MAX of Indiana, the average sales price of existing homes stood at $162,429 in July. That’s an increase of 5.4 percent from the same month in 2010, when the average sales price of existing homes came in at $154,168.
Of course, the Indiana housing market has a long way to go before it again mimics the boom times that the state’s residential housing market experienced in the early 2000s.
In that respect, though, Indiana is far from alone. The vast majority of housing markets across the United States, even with their July bumps, are still seeing both sales and average prices far below their 2005 levels.
Housing prices won’t reach those levels for a long, long time. But until they at least get in the same neighborhood, expect both the national economy’s and the commercial real estate market’s recoveries to be awfully slow ones.
