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Highlands Today

Highlands Housing Market Seeing Early Signs Of Life

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 27, 2009

Please sit down while reading this. We have identified a promising sign in our local economy. Everyone's been looking for something positive and although it's small right now, it's something to make us feel good about, and we all desperately need that these days.

Home sales in Highlands County are creeping up. In the last month or two, more houses have been sold than during the same time last year. No one's declaring the recession is over. In fact, we're far from it. But we'll take any positive indicator as something to celebrate.

Throughout Florida, home sales are bucking the national trend and seeing growth. That hasn't happened since the boom was at its height. It seems like Florida has been the hardest hit state. It started early and has stayed stagnant for a long time. Times are changing, though.

The bad news is that the bump in home sales is due to prices becoming so low. Bargains are everywhere for anyone looking to buy. For those of us who already have homes, this doesn't help too much and actually hurts. If we're upside down on loans we can't sell our houses to buy new ones. However, it's still a good sign.

Without big industry here in Highlands County, housing and construction are two of our biggest employers. When that goes south, it hurts everyone and that's why so many businesses are struggling. In one way or another, they depend on construction to pay wages directly or indirectly.

There's a big inventory of homes to be sold before we are out of the woods on any level. Don't look to see new houses springing up everywhere due to a good month of home sales. Still, this is a postive sign, and we hope this continues to grow in the coming months as more incentives are offered to homebuyers and banks loosen credit to responsible borrowers.

Much of this economic recession is due to public perception. If we think times are bad, we don't spend and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, there are other factors as well, such as bad home loans that are dragging everything down, but consumer confidence also plays a huge role.

We hope home sales continue to grow in Highlands County and some, if not all, of what ails us starts to fade away.

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