Real estate market faces long recovery

Real estate market faces long recovery
By Ben Antonius | Daily Republic | October 29, 2009

FAIRFIELD - They were trying to be positive. Really.

None of the three speakers at a Thursday morning Real Estate Round-up could be described as optimistic, but all three joked that they had tried to make their summaries of the local market as positive as they could.

The consensus was that, despite promising signs, the local commercial, industrial and retail markets still have a long recovery ahead of them.

'The glass is 40 percent half-full,' said Brooks Pedder of Colliers International.

The Solano Economic Development Corp. puts on the annual event, which generally focuses on commercial and industrial real estate.

The commercial vacancy rate is at about 26 percent, Pedder said, a figure he said might be the highest ever.

'Residential mortgage titles, when those shut down it killed us,' he said.

Jose McNeill of McNeill Real Estate Services expressed concern about some larger trends looming over the economy, in particular singling out the threat of inflation driven by a rapid increase of government spending.

He showed a graph showing plummeting consumer confidence, a trend he described as worrisome for economic recovery.

'(Consumer confidence) is really the driver,' he said.

Pedder said Solano County has characteristics that have historically been appealing to companies when finances are tight, such as relatively inexpensive labor and housing and the fact that employees living elsewhere would have a reverse commute to Solano County.

'Everyone here needs to walk and talk and drink the Kool-Aid and support Solano,' he said.

Jim Shepherd with Cornish & Carey talked about the local retail markets, which have been hit hard since early 2008 by a series of bankruptcies and store closures. In Fairfield alone, the list of closures includes Circuit City, Linens N Things and Mervyns.

See the complete story at the Daily Republic online.