Gerald Hendry, managing partner of Maxwell, Hendry & Simmons, a Fort Myers real estate appraisal firm, recently used a Halloween metaphor to describe the scary and sweet sides of commercial real estate in Southwest Florida.
“We thought we’d start with a little Halloween vibe here, so who’s going to be knocking on your commercial real estate door this Halloween? The menacing Chucky or the friendly Minnie Mouse?” Hendry said. Asked.
“There’s a lot of good things happening in our market, but there’s a lot of difficult things happening in our market,” he answered his own question. “I call them our Chuckies. The challenging ones that we fear and that we should be wary of.”
“The obvious thing is interest rates,” he continued. “Are we trending down? I think it’s very unlikely. I think we’re still trending up, but probably not as fast. It depends on the number of deals and We have a pretty big impact on our market just by pure activity.This is ours.”The biggest challenge right now, that’s our biggest Chucky. ”
He then shared his thoughts on whether Southwest Florida is heading into a recession.
“So the big question is: Is Southwest Florida an exception to this rule, or are we just delaying the inevitable? We don’t know the answer to that, but some of the larger reforms in the federal government I think that might give us the answer.”But I think we’re a little bit of an exception to that because of Hurricane Ian that happened last year. Billions of dollars are flowing into our economy right now. We’ve kind of isolated our economy right now, so we’ll see how it goes.”
I guess it’s Minnie for now. Mr. Hendry noted what the latest National Association of Realtors Home Affordability Index reveals about our market.
“Look at that decline. It means people can’t afford to buy homes. So what’s the alternative? Probably multifamily housing,” he continued. “Just the big, big, big deals going on would lead you to believe there’s an incredible amount of activity going on. But if you look at our sales volume this year, We’re down significantly and we’re at a 10-year low right now in terms of sales volume. ”
It’s Chucky. In the end, Hendry believes that a positive Minnie Mouse will prevail, but that doesn’t mean everything will be smooth sailing. Looks like there’s still a lot of Chucky to come.
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