A couple of Reuters real estate stories indicate the pain of the economic downturn may be shifting.
A British analyst says commercial real estate prices fell by double digits in the first quarter.
And a second calls today’s National Association of Realtors housing sales report for April an indication that the market has bottomed out and the recession is ending.
The second story is overly optimistic in the eyes of Wichita’s residential brokers and analysts, who say the local market has a long way to go to recover.
And no recovery is likely until job security increases in the Wichita area.
For a fortnight, I thought Sedgwick County’s proposal to drop a cool $14 million on 808 acres of prime industrial land the city of Bel Aire can’t give away was going to slip under the radar.
Brother, was I wrong!
The proposed purchase and installation of a rail spur is the talk of the city’s development community, and not in a positive way. The word “bailout” keeps coming up.
The proposal is being characterized by developers in a variety of ways: A knee-jerk reaction to Siemens’ decision to locate near Hutchinson – ironically, on a big chunk of land near a rail spur; an attempt by the county to save one jurisdiction from financial ruin; an ill-fated reach for a huge industrial client.
And in several meeting rooms, as the county going into direct competition against private developers.
There’s some truth to that argument. Can the county wait for years while the area pursues the ever-elusive Toyota plant? Probably not. So the alternative becomes subdividing the land into smaller development chunks – and going into competition against the city’s private developers.
Not a real incentive for private development, is it?
Sedgwick County’s idea to establish a huge industrial park’s got some merit – but you can fairly wonder if a tract with a bad track record of development interest is the place to start.
This chunk of land certainly looks like a bad idea – for Bel Aire back in the days when its council went into the real estate development business.
And for Sedgwick County now unless the land is de-annexed and the county makes its peace with local developers.