I continue to be absolutely gob-smacked at the spin I hear from otherwise smart — brilliant even — people regarding the health of the Charlotte economy and its real estate sector in particular. On Sunday it was Mark Vitner in the Uptown paper of record:
Even so, Charlotte has remained relatively healthy, says Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wachovia Corp.
The area has been protected by steady doses of job growth in an economy that is attracting skilled professionals and young workers from other hard-hit areas, he said.
“If you look at the economies of areas where people are moving, like Charlotte, they’re holding up relatively well,” he said. “The negatives are not as negative. We didn’t have a housing bubble.”
On Friday, it was mega-broker Kemp Dunaway making essentially the same point to the CBJ:
We remain very strong. Because we didn’t experience the extreme price increases like Florida and California, we will not suffer the extreme drops that many parts of the country have seen. Our metropolitan areas across the state continue to attract new residents.
Let’s back up. Those new residents Charlotte has welcomed for decades now have been coming flush with cash to spend on our housing market. Now each household is coming several hundred thousand dollars poorer. This matters.
And, one more time, just because Charlotte did not have a speculator-driven run up like in Miami or Vegas does not mean the bottom cannot likewise fall out of the local housing market. The key component is income — how much house can people afford? If people cannot afford real estate at a given price-point, the price must come down.
At minimum, we know that at any given income level, lenders will be pulling back on the amount of money they are willing to lend to all but the most gold-plated credit records. This alone creates a downward pressure on prices.
In speculative markets, the first sign of weakening prices triggers a massive sell-off as investors rush to get out what they can. Charlotte is not in that mode. We understand that. What is being overlooked — along with the impact of relos losing spendable cash — is Charlotte’s vulnerability to job loss, hence income loss, in the banking sector.
It is an open secret in the local financial world that both BofA and Wachovia will have to retrench soon and the only question is how many local jobs are lost in the process. A few hundred? A few thousand? No one knows. But it is coming.
One analyst is predicting 200,000 jobs will go poof in the banking sector in the next year to 18 months. Another report argued that banks are facing their biggest crisis in 30 years. Doesn’t mean they are right, but we should greet the concerns with something besides spin, happy talk, and a gesture towards all the busy cranes Uptown.
Update: What do you know — a new poll finds that the economy is the top concern of North Carolina voters.