Gerald Hendry, managing partner of real estate appraisal firm Maxwell, Hendry and Simmons in Fort Myers, recently used a Halloween analogy regarding the scary and the sweet sides of commercial real estate in Southwest Florida.
"I thought I would start with a little Halloween spirit here: so who's knocking on our Halloween commercial real estate door this year? Is it menacing Chucky or is it sweet Minnie Mouse," asked Hendry.
"We've got a lot of good things going on in our market and we have a lot of challenging things going on in our market," he answered his own question. "I'll call those our Chuckies. Our challenging things we are afraid of and we should be looking out for."
"The obvious? Interest rates," he continued. "Are we heading down? I think that’s highly unlikely. I think we're heading up still, though probably not at as rapid of a pace. That's impacting our market pretty significantly with the number of deals and just pure activity. So that's our biggest challenge right now, that's our biggest Chucky."
He then shared his thoughts on whether or not Southwest Florida is headed for a recession.
"So the big question is, is Southwest Florida the exception to the rule or are we just delaying the inevitable? I don't know that we know the answer to that and I think some of the larger federal changes, may answer that for us. But I think we are a little bit of that exception because of something that happened last year, which was Hurricane Ian. We have billions of dollars flowing into our economy right now. We're kind of insulating our own economy right now so we'll see how that all plays out."
I guess that’s a Minnie, for the time being. Hendry noted what the most recent National Association of Realtors housing affordability index reveals about our marketplace.
"Look at the drop in that--meaning people can't afford to buy houses, so what's the alternative? Probably multifamily," hen went on. " Just massive, massive, massive transactions that would lead you to believe that we are just seeing a crazy amount of activity. But look at our sales volume this year: we are so far down, we're at a 10-year low right now in terms of sales volume."
That’s a Chucky. In the end, Hendry believes that positive Minnie Mouse is going to prevail, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be all smooth sailing. It sounds like we still have plenty of Chuckys still to come.
To read more stories about the arts in Southwest Florida visit Tom Hall's website: SWFL Art in the News.
