Is Any Market REALLY Recession Proof? An About Face from Forbes

All it takes is a month of triple digit weather in Texas for the real estate market to improve in Colorado. I got word that Aspen, a bellwether for the second home real state market, is bustling with Texans buying second or third homes there.  I’ll have to dial up my friend, Steven Shane. Not so much activity over in Martha’s Vineyard, where Courtney Marek at SandPiper Realty tells me her market is sluggish. Aren’t all those Wall Street types snapping up Chappaquiddick, I asked? Not really, says Courtney. The second home market is strange. It consists of affluent owners and buyers. So unless an owner is in serious financial straits they usually just ride out the storm.

Speaking of storms,  this article out of Destin, Florida caught my eye, because so many Texans have second homes there: trusty Forbes Magazine, it says,  made a sort of “technical error” and published a headline on the Forbes website shouting, about Destin: “Cities where real estate is resisting recession.” But then a subhead on an accompanying photo gallery tried to keep things short and sweet, and referred to the list as “recession-proof cities”.  Forbes has since said that headline was a “technical error,” probably written by an editr unfamiar with the gist of the story.

Recession-proof cities? Is there such a beast? The point of the Forbes piece was that Florida, one of the hardest hit states during the real estate “boom and bust”, has faired better than most other areas in the county. Which is almost impossible to believe. Yes Destin, near my precious Alys Beach, was one of six healthy Florida markets on the list. Real estate prices have plunged 37.2 percent there since the peak of the housing market, the article says. But though that was quite a plunge, the Forbes article says that Destin is finally gaining momentum.

An article in the the local Destinlog.com begs to differ.

According to a local housing analyst, Mike Colpitts, Destin has a median home price of $159,000 and shows a second quarter 2011 price increase of 5.6 percent.

But Colpitts said there were some “real errors” in the article, noting that the median home price was used, which he says is not a good indication if a market is growing or deflating.

“Prices are down 7 percent from the start of the year,” the Destin resident said. “Prices are going down in Destin and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that.”

Colpitts says 14.4 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are in foreclosure, and from what he sees on a daily basis, there are more to come. More than half of all the remaining homes and condos in the state with mortgages are going to be in foreclosure.

“It’s bad out there,” the 25-year real estate analyst told said. “It looks like an easy five more years of this unless the government is really going to do something.”