The Ebb and Flow of the San Antonio Housing Market

A Local Market

The housing market is one of the most fluid industries that exist which helps explain why you can hardly ever watch an hour of the news without hearing how the market is doing.  Real estate markets often change due to major national events such as stock market shifts, interest rates, seasonal changes, housing/lending law changes etc.  However, perhaps more significantly, local economic changes can and do dramatically effect the housing market.  You have probably heard the saying “real estate is local” which becomes clearly evident when you look at a small bungalow in

Alamo

Heights

versus almost the exact same square footage and age home off of Vance Jackson in Dellview.  The $300,000 price difference proves the point that not only is real estate local to an individual state or city but it is also localized to a specific neighborhood and sometimes even street.

No Reason to Panic 

When AT&T announced it’s relocation of around 700 employees from the San Antonio area to Dallas, local newspapers and reporters started a flurry of panic regarding the negative impact this would have on the San Antonio housing market.  Although dumping a few hundred homes on the market in the same week is hardly ever a good thing, there are many additional factors to look at before we start to panic about dipping prices and adding to an already saturated supply of homes.  One of the first things to consider is that some of the primary areas of that these employees lived in (Alamo Heights, Olmos Park, Monte Vista, and Terrell Hills) do not typically have a great number of homes on the market and therefore will be able to recover quicker from a large market supply than would other areas of San Antonio. 

Help is on the Way

          Just as SBC Communications, now AT&T, helped lift an unfavorable housing market in 1992 when they relocated their headquarters from St. Louis to San Antonio other local businesses are making decisions that will stimulate the San Antonio market and soften the blow of the 700 AT&T employees relocating from our area.  Rackspace Managed Hosting is continually recruiting employees to the area as Fort Sam Houston is planning on bringing in a few thousand personnel to the area. 

Additionally, a decision will be made on where to build a somewhat controversial bio-defense lab for the Department of Homeland Security. 

San Antonio

is one of the top six final sites in consideration.  This facility would create as many as 350 new jobs in the

San Antonio

area, further alleviating the market saturation caused by the AT&T move.  As stated in the San Antonio Business Journal’s article, “We have the right mix of resources, expertise, infrastructure, workforce and community support needed for the (facility) to succeed,” says Smith, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee.  “Not many cities can compete with that.”  Indeed,

San Antonio

has many features that continue relocation of large businesses to the area which gives further credence to the idea that real estate is local and locally . . . we’re going to be just fine.