Columbia's Mortgage and Real Estate Market

I attended the Small Business Committee meeting today at the Columbia Chamber of Commerce. We broke into groups to discuss the challenges faced by small businesses here in Columbia, Missouri. And, while the usual topics of health care costs and wages and lack of qualified labor all were brought up, my interest was peaked by a topic that concerns those of us in the real estate industry.

It is becoming more apparent to the business community that we have a severe lack of low to middle income industry. By that I mean jobs for the so called "blue collar" workers. Columbia is becoming a city of those being catered to and those who are being ignored. It seems that members of the Chamber are concerned that we are too focused on attracting only the highly paid and are forgetting that the majority of people fall into the middle income category. This is certainly true if you examine the focus of new home construction in the past couple of years. Builders have primarily focus on high margin/high priced housing.

This has affected our industry in a negative way. Currently the majority of homes sold are under $200,000 and most of those have been pre-owned. We have been lucky in Columbia as the University, the city and the insurance industry have helped our city from downturns in the past. But, Columbia has grown to the point that other industries must be attracted (and bring in new citizens) so that we can continue to grow steadily. We need to get "blue collar" industry so that we don't have a future problem with our burgeoning construction industry. Bringing in buyers of lower priced homes will increase demand and contractors can turn to building at those price levels so that we can ease out of our overstock of high priced homes.

We, as an industry who are concerned about keeping our city a good place to live, need to let our city council and mayor know that we are concerned about more than parks and bike trails. Those are nice but not too much comfort if you are not able to find a job or afford the housing.

Your comments are always welcome!


Brought to you by Professional Mortgage Group, Inc. (http://www.pmg-inc.net/) in Columbia, Missouri.