Charm City Baltimore Real Estate: Baltimore, Maryland Real Estate & Homes

The Wall Street Journal reported in yesterday’s edition (11.15.2006) that although real estate inventory in Baltimore increased by 2.1% last month, inventory in Washington DC actually decreased by 3.4%. If there is any statistic that predicts coming stabilization in the Baltimore market, its this one. Many of our new buyers have been coming from Washington, drawn by lower prices and relative ease of commute. If inventory there is starting to shrink, prices will hold, and once again buyers will look to Baltimore as the affordable alternative.

Coming as this does at a time when mortgage rates are holding or lowering slightly, this only makes the possibilities of a turnaround by springtime more likely.

Will the media report this in a positive way, or will they ignore it and go on predicting gloom and doom? Well, the Baltimore SUN has given no play to these stats at all in today’s edition.

I can think of only a couple of reasons why this might be overlooked. One would be that negative, ‘the sky is falling’ stories sell newspapers.

A second reason is a little more cynical, and more plausible. David Lereah, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, has postulated that the real estate boom of the last few years robbed Wall Street of the investment cash they were looking for to resume the Bull Market of the ’90s. As real estate prices escalated over a period of years, people thought it was a safer bet to buy, renovate and re-sell real estate and so stock prices languished.

Now, as the media has been hyping the bad news stories about real estate, look at what has happened to the Dow. Despite the general feeling that the economy is sluggish, uneven, and not doing as well as the statistics suggest, the markets have been hitting new record after new record. And media companies are, for the most part, public stock companies who have benefitted from the run up in stock prices.

Could it be possible that the media is actively trying to keep the real estate market slow so that their shareholders benefit?

Baltimore has never been a big condo town, and at the time of the last market downturn, some of the most well publicized failures (think Harborview) were condo developments that had gotten ahead of themselves and the market. With that history, you’d think that developers this time around would be a little more cautious.

Not bloodly likely. The city is currently expecting ground breaking on hundreds of new condominium units, and has hundreds currently under construction. From the incredibly high-end units at the Four Seasons and the Ritz Carlton, to the more modestly priced units on Water Street, most of the cranes visible on the city skyline are building residential units. Two sixty-story towers are planned for Guilford Avenue between City Hall and the Standard Oil Building, and another mega tower is planned for the old McCormick site on the Inner Harbor, which will be a mix of ground level commercial, a hotel, and condominiums. Streuver Brothers is gamely building condos on Charles Street in Midtown and on Saint Paul Street in Charles Village. The word on the street is that these non-MLS offerings are not moving well.

Developers defend this ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’ attitude in the name of BRAC, the military base closure commission, that promises thousands of new jobs in Maryland at bases just to the north and just to the south of Baltimore. They say that lots of condos can be expected to offer reasonably priced housing to these workers and everything will be grand. Just grand.

I think a little more healthy skepticism would better serve the city, and their personal financial condition. Time will tell.

Bashing the media in Baltimore is nothing new; its beyond a spectator sport, but actually most people in town have had their chance to bash the Baltimore SUN for its hysterical and sometimes intentional misrepresentation of the real estate market. But I’m going to take it further. There’s NO decent media outlet in the city that really covers the real estate market in accurate thoughtful terms. None of the business papers focus on it with any regularity. The Baltimore EXAMINER is a complete waste of trees. I would feel horrible for the stately oaks that gave their lives to become the newsprint for the EXAMINER, laying on sidewalks and in flower beds all over town, moldering in its plastic bag.

That is, if it got delivered to someone’s door at all.

But since the SUN is still the most widely regarded source of real estate news in the region, its there that the most strong criticism must remain. Compared to the size of the real estate section in the SUN, especially on Sundays, the amount of time and energy put into the real estate reporting is pitiful. Its also driven by political agenda, since it often doesn’t matter what you *say* to a SUN reporter, you will be misquoted, quoted out of context, or simply have a quote refashioned out of what you *did* say to agree with the tenor of the article that the reported wanted to write all along.

The market in Baltimore will remain in flux until the SUN decides to stop trumpeting the end of the world, the bursting of the bubble, etc. etc. and starts to report on what is actually happening in the city. What they’re doing is a disservice to the buyers and sellers in this market, and to the professionals who have the knowledge of what is happening and are being ignored.