A Bright Spot in Gloomy Real Estate Market

(Ambient sound – Higgerson describing a Hanover property as he drives)

Upper Valley real estate broker Rick Higgerson wheels his SUV through the quiet residential streets of Hanover.

He points out properties his company recently sold.

Higgerson - This house went on the market at eight-twenty-five and was on the market for four days before it went under contract. This is definitely a nice neighborhood that we’re in right now but a comparable house like that probably anywhere else in New Hampshire may sell for 55 or 60 percent of that price. So Hanover definitely commands a premium.

And while other New Hampshire towns have seen houses on the market for over a year, the opposite seems true in Hanover.

According to broker Higgerson, selling time here is often measured in days rather than months.

Higgerson – The number of days on market, the actual time it’s taken a house go under contract from when it initially goes out into the open market is very very low.

The New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority predicts as many as 3,000 foreclosures in the state this year.

And again, Hanover seems to have been exempt.

An employee at the town office said foreclosures and tax sales there are rare.

Professor John Vogell, who teaches Real Estate at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, says part of the reason is that Hanover’s market is a little peculiar.

Professor Vogell - …..And it almost hasn’t been affected. And the reason for that is because the employment base here has been so strong.

Vogell points to the twin cornerstones of the Upper Valley economy, Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

There are other economic strongholds.

Hanover’s Hypertherm regularly advertises well-paying jobs.

Just down the road, Tele Atlas North in Lebanon was listed by Business New Hampshire Magazine as one of the state’s best large companies to work for.

Other high-tech, well-paying companies add to the mix.

Those good jobs, and the desirable location, have driven home prices well above the averages in most New Hampshire towns.

Professor Vogell:

Professor Vogell - The median price house in Hanover now is $650,000 and about a quarter of the houses currently that are listed are in the six to seven hundred thousand range. You have a couple of houses as low as two hundred thousand and six houses that are between a million-two and two million-eight.

But Vogell adds, the Hanover market has cooled from the boom years.

Hanover properties used to command prices that exceeded even brokers’ expectations.

Professor Vogell - Today, the brokers, when they go and talk to people, say ‘You gotta be realistic in your pricing.’ So if the person says ‘I want to try for the six hundred thousand because I know I could have gotten that a year ago,’ the brokers are saying, ‘No you’ve got to go for five hundred and we won’t even take your property.”

Sharon Whittaker is the Director of retail lending for Lake Sunapee Bank.

Whittaker - The market itself, from what we measure—we look at recorded mortgages—and the market itself is slower from where it was in year’s past. However, it is still healthy.

Another part of the reason for the relative health of the housing market in Hanover may be that higher priced homes in general have not been feeling the same downturn.

And says John Vogell most Hanover property owners wanting to sell can probably afford to wait out the market slump.

Professor Vogell - Maybe they wanted to sell their house, they wanted to move to a retirement community, they wanted to move to the south, but they say ‘You know, the market’s kind of soft now, maybe I’ll wait another year.”

This healthier market does not, however, stretch much beyond Hanover and Lebanon.

Vogell notes that the further one gets away from Hanover, the more the real estate market mirrors the dire predicament displayed daily in the news.

Professor Vogell - If you go outside of Hanover and you go 20 or 30 miles away to an area like Claremont, which has been badly hit by recessions and job closings, you find something that looks a lot more like the rest of the country, where housing prices are falling off and there is excess supply and the mortgage market, the uncertainty of buyers, comes much more into play.

For NHPR news, this is Kevin Forrest.