STL Develops

While we’ve all seen the doom and gloom news reports about the state of the real estate market , it is a fact that St. Louis is really better off than most metropolitan areas according to Forbes . While I can tell you as a real estate professional that this year has been slow, we are actually doing better than most cities. St. Louis developers have struggled as evidenced by the shut down of Taylor Morley and Pyramid Companies, as well as the public troubles of Saaman Realty. However, St. Louis has a reasonably low inventory of vacant new construction compared to cities in the West and South that have thousands of speculative neighborhoods sitting empty, especially in the city and near by suburbs. Downtown St. Louis has been overbuilt, but developers have responded. Properties originally planned to be condos or lofts are being developed as rental housing, like The Lawrence Groups Park Pacific development, or commercial space. Also, projects that were proposed have been cancelled or put on hold like Pyramids COs Leather Trades Build. If you buy a property today are you going to be able to sell it for a huge profit next year of the year after? Probably not. But I do think that St. Louis property values will begin to rise significantly sooner than most of the country. Right now prices are favorable and interest rates are low, so I think that there are definitely some great long term deals to be made.