Looking for a home?

Thanks to the national media, we all know the housing market is on the fritz. But local realtors are urging residents to take advantage of the robust inventory of houses and decreasing mortgage rates in St. Tammany Parish, where housing sales remain encouraging.

Realtors like JoAnne Ferrara-Mo with Prudential Gardner in Slidell are fed up with the end of the world mentality being portrayed throughout the media.

“It’s too negative. People listen to too much news,” Ferrara-Mo said.

“As always with Louisiana, you cannot compare us to the nation because it’s never the same,” Coldwell Banker TEC realtor in Slidell Marcelle Clement-Mccarthy said.

The nation may be hurting, but St. Tammany is not, Clement-Mccarthy said, thanks to the influx of businesses and people after Hurricane Katrina.

Ferrara-Mo, Clement-Mccarthy and other realtors admit St. Tammany’s housing market is slow, but they say it is nowhere near the brink of extinction like other markets are said to be.

“You have to turn lemons into lemonade and take advantage of the nice inventory on the market right now,” said Ferrara-Mo, who recently purchased a home.

It’s definitely a buyers market right now, agreed Martha Mears with Coldwell Banker TEC Realtors.

With the robust inventory of homes, it’s never been a better time to buy, Mears said.

Just look at the numbers, Leah Wartelle with Keller Williams in Slidell said. In 2007, 1,601 homes were sold, out of 1,794 listed, for $297 million in the eastern half of the parish alone. The average house sale was $184,970 with 18 homes selling for more than half a million dollars, Wartelle said.

That’s a sharp contrast to this year, where as of Friday in the Slidell area, only 934 homes have been sold out of 1,992 listed.

“With the market the way it is, two things will get a house sold right now. One, the price has to be right, and two, it has to be in great condition,” Wartelle said.

The parish has certainly seen a slow down with its housing industry, but “we haven’t seen nearly the number of foreclosures as in the rest of the country,” Mears said, adding she expects this to continue.

“With all this doom and gloom on TV you would think the world is coming to an end,” but it’s not, Mears said.

Jeff Breland with Century 21 investment reality and a local developer in East St. Tammany said the housing slump in south Louisiana makes perfect sense.

After Katrina, the housing industry boomed big time in St. Tammany. It only makes sense for that escalation to plateau at some point. This is that point, Breland said.

“There was an overbuilding of new construction post Katrina. Home prices were grossly inflated,” he said.

Now that the housing market is slowing and prices are leveling off, the commercial market is picking up steam, Breland said, with several new major projects ongoing throughout the parish right now.

But Breland doesn’t expect the buying slump to continue into 2009.

“Because of St. Tammany’s infrastructure and opportunities that are arising in the area, I see 2009 home sales increasing,” Breland said.

It’s looking up for Jan Brown with Re/Max Real Estate Partners, who currently has three buyers with one working on a contract.

Despite what national media sources are saying about the housing finance market, realtors said it’s still relatively easy to secure financing in St. Tammany.

In fact, realtors are seeing a shift in financing from the conventional loans to the FHA government distributed loans.

Apparently, Wartelle said, the FHA is making itself more appealing to homebuyers with lower interest rates.

The best news of all for homebuyers, Wartelle said, is interest rates on most loans will continue dropping, making it easer to own a home.