Thursday’s weather was not unlike the economic outlook for Brunswick County.
Intermittent sunlight punctuated the slightly gray skies until brightness largely took hold during the latter part of the morning.
It was the perfect metaphor for a midyear presentation by William Hall, senior economist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Cameron School of Business, who spoke to almost 100 people during the 35th annual membership meeting of the Southport-Oak Island Chamber of Commerce at the Southport Community Building.
“It’s going to take a while to recover what we lost, but we will recover,” Hall said of what experts are calling the Great Recession. “It will end.”
It’s the worst of six national recessions Hall said he has analyzed during his long career as an economist.
It seems less pessimism is the new optimism, he said. Many attendees seemed satisfied, all things considered, with Hall’s forecast that the three-county region will experience economic growth of 4 percent in 2010.
“It looks like the first half of the year is going to be pretty strong. It’s in a lot better shape than some parts of the state and some parts of the country,” Hall said, citing 2010 forecasted growth figures of 2.2 percent for North Carolina and 3.1 percent for the United States. “We’re not where we were five years ago, but we probably never will be.”
He discussed “the fallacy of getting back to where we were.” Lax qualifications for housing finance and other factors fueled the previous growth this region experienced, a level that is unrealistic and not sustainable over the long term, Hall said.
As a result, economic growth is likely to be lower over the next five years than during the five years prior to the recession, he said.
The phrase “testing a cyclical low” came up when discussing the local real estate industry, an echo of Hall’s words from previous years.
“There is growing evidence that activity in this sector has bottomed out,” he said. “That is not to say that the sector has resumed growth, but only that activity has ceased falling.”
Most Brunswick County developers would agree from personal experience that real estate sales are down.
While there is some construction going on in Leland’s Magnolia Greens, it will likely take “a year or so” to sell the remaining 25 lots of the 1,175 in the community, said Rex Stephens, owner of developer Landmark Commercial.
But many remain optimistic about what they’ve seen in 2010 so far.
“Everything has been trending in the right direction,” said Mary Ann McCarthy, president of the Brunswick County Association of Realtors. “Inventory has been trending down some, and sales have definitely been trending upward, so we’re significantly ahead of where we were this time last year.”
View the complete set of slides from Thursday’s presentation at uncw.edu/cbes/events/index.htm" target="_blank">www.csb.uncw.edu/cbes/events/index.htm starting Monday.
Full Article
Ken KeeganReal Estate Broker(910) 523-0903 mobileEmail Mewww.KenKeegan.com
No comments:
Post a Comment