Bouncing Along the Bottom

Talking to real estate brokers about the current state of the single-family residential market can be a tricky business.

For starters, they aren't as many of them as there used to be, with many professionals riding the wave of easy credit, skyrocketing housing prices and large commissions during the boom deciding to flee to safer waters after the crash.

But there are plenty of veteran brokers still in the game, such as Sundeep Shrivastav at Laffey Fine Homes in Little Neck, making deals despite a market bedeviled by unrealistic expectations from both buyers and sellers, banks unwilling to lend and falling home prices.

As for those falling real estate values: according to Shrivastav, things are going to get worse for long-suffering Little Neck homeowners before they get better.

"Prices are just going down, down, down," he said this week.

One of factors dragging down prices is foreclosures  -- not so much in Northeast Queens, but in other parts of the borough like Jackson Heights, Corona and Jamaica.

"People here read about those foreclosures in other neighborhoods and they don't think it affects them," Shrivastav said. "But it does."

However, Little Neck has not completely escaped the crisis of home mortgage defaults. A search of foreclosures in the 11363 zip code on real estate database Zillow.com shows six single-family homes on the market in some stage of mortgage default.

According to Shrivastav, another big factor weighing down home values has been deep and persistent unemployment both locally and nationally.

However, on that front at least, there has been encouraging signs of life. 

Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported stronger than expected job growth in the hard-hit private sector, with 159,000 positions created in October. On Wednesday, Labor Department officials released numbers showing new jobless benefit filings nationally at their lowest level in two years.

Though the most-recent local numbers are not yet available, so far Queens has seen an .8 percent year-to-year drop in the jobless rate, with September unemployment pegged at 8.3 percent.

Despite the glimmer of recovery, at Shrivatav's office on Northern Boulevard, the only buyers with confidence in the market are those employed in industries well-insulated from the moribund economy, such as healthcare workers, he said.

"Healthcare, medicine ... that's the place to be," he sighed, with a hint of something like wistfulness in his voice.

Paul Leonard is the local editor of Little Neck Patch. Starting next week, Just Business, his column focusing on issues important to local homeowners, investors and consumers, will appear every Tuesday.