Originally Posted by
shipdadip
Good time to buy a home in WNY. Contact me if you're in the market. Also interest rates are amazingly low right now!
Buffalo ranked 4th strongest housing market by Forbes magazine
By Sharon Linstedt
News Business Reporter
Buffalo area home owners and real estate agents might have envied their peers during the housing boom, but they can now gloat as many other market go bust.
According to a Forbes Magazine, Buffalo ranks No. 4 among the 25 strongest housing market. And it has everything to do with not being a "boomtown." It's the same story with the other urban areas at the top of the list, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, which conducted the research for Forbes.
"None participated in the housing boom," Zandi said, refering to his rankings which put McAllen, Texas, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and El Paso, Texas, as the top five markets on the list.
The Forbes piece explains housing markets in upstate New York never had the ups and downs of some hot market in the rest of the country. Zandi predicts home prices in Buffalo, Syracuse and Albany should remain steady in the coming year. For Buffalo, he forecasts no more than a 1 percent decline in values.
Moody's is predicting an average 15 percent decline across the U.S. housing market as a whole.
Local residential sales data collected by the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors bear out the Forbes/Moody's research. In November, the most recent month for which BNAR data is available, the number of residential sales in Erie and Niagara Counties dropped a whopping 21 percent, but among the 714 units that sold, the average sale price climbed 23 percent from the prior year.