Today March 11th, 2011 a massive 8.9 earthquake hit the north coast of Japan causing a Tsunami affect, which wiped out major city sections and caused mad devastation to the country as a whole. Being the world's third largest economy I thought it would be interesting to make a quick analogy as to how this might affect home values or demand for real estate in a major city like NYC. Of course, our thoughts go out to all those in Japan and this post is not meant to belittle the devastation by any means.
Very quickly: the Tsunami caused the Japanese stock market to collapse and with globalization that in turn caused the US stock market to tumble. What this can mean is more investors will be reminded of the volatility of the stock market and may sway them to move more dollars into REITS and or private investments. This tragic event might also remind Japanese citizens who own second homes in Japan to perhaps move their future investments to another major city with no earthquake history (knock on wood) such as NYC. This in turn will increase demand for real estate in NYC driving values higher. Of course this is a short term affect, but if the recovery efforts in Japan take a while it might just be long enough to drive the real estate market in NYC.
Please feel free to comment as I love to engage in these conversation mixing economy and real estate.
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