Alabama Housing Market in 2007: Expect a Steady Year
Local mortgage brokers say the Birmingham market has always been characterized by slow and steady growth - usually avoiding the extreme fluctuations that have often cursed other regions.
As the calendar turns to 2007, residential real estate professionals don’t expect that to change this year. They’re forecasting another year of steady, if unspectacular, performance for the metro area.
Tommy Brigham, chairman and CEO of RealtySouth, said he expects 2007 to be similar to the year Birmingham had in 2006, with the main indicators - unemployment, job creation and mortgage interest rates - suggesting another steady year for the metro area.
“Our housing industry doesn’t have the ebbs and flows, the hyper-inflation and the fall-out that comes from the very strong jumps,” Brigham said. “We are stable and move slowly, but comfortably along.”
Brigham said that comfortable growth has allowed the metro area to keep some upward mobility in terms of housing prices for Alabama mortgage seekers - a luxury that some other markets do not have for 2007.
Those conditions have led to what Brigham describes as a “stable market for both buyers and sellers,” with sellers realizing a reasonable amount of appreciable growth and a reasonable supply of homes that allow buyers to be more selective.
Cody Cato, a residential Realtor for Abana Realty, said he believes the Birmingham housing market will be a buyer’s market in 2007, due to the high supply of homes on the market - which has topped 10,000.
“This time last year, we had six or seven thousand,” Cato said. “Homes are beginning to take longer to sell. Higher-end homes are taking about a year.”
Despite the high supply, Cato and other home mortgage brokers said they expect prices to hold and possibly increase marginally.
Leonard Zumpano, Alabama Association of Realtors Chair of Real Estate and professor of finance at the University of Alabama, projects that 2007 will be very similar to 2006 for the Birmingham market.
“I suspect (2007) will be comparable to 2006, maybe a tad slower in the first half of the year,” Zumpano said. “I just don’t see any bad news on the horizon for the state.”