Encouraging Increase in Real Estate Enquiries due to falling prices…….. by Simon Padgett

I have this week been encouraged by the number of real estate enquiries, which I would say are double of last week and I am not aware that we have had anything particularly special happening on the island, other than we are in the heart of the high season. I had heard via another RE/MAX agent that Sales in Florida were up 40% for February on the previous month and I have requested her source on this. It was additionally confirmed on the BBC News today that house prices had risen in the UK last month by 0.9% which is the first rise since October 2007. It is nothing amazing, but they are green shoots for sure. Hey, we will grab any good headline at the moment.

There is no doubt that prices on the islands have fallen and I would split the drops into two areas:

The first area is the distressed properties that we have on the island, albeit they are few and far between. I have personally sold properties that are approximately 30-35% off 2007 prices and in one instance a property that was 40% less.

The second area is a generic price reduction, which I believe is around 20% across the board.

The fact is that we needed this shift as prices had quite simply escalated too much between 2002 and mid 2007. The Turks and Caicos attract a high number of high net worth individuals who mostly pay cash for their purchases, so we are safe from seeing the high percentage of repossessions and short sales that are being experienced in the likes of locations such as Las Vegas and Florida, where they have experienced considerable condo hotel developments over the last 6 -7 years.

However, they do exist here and I make it my business to find them out for any client that is interested in finding a good deal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Real Estate Market Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.