New Orleans??

[Gene Kardos]

Greetings all. My wife and I recently took a holiday down in New Orleans and was astonished by the amount of property that was destroyed and still just sitting there. We have been talking about investing down there. It seems to us that one could pickup properties fairly cheap and rehab them, not to mention being involved in helping rebuild this once beautiful area. Does anyone know anything about the market down there? Has anyone done any investing down there?

[Mark McGlothlin]

Gene, my team has been following NOLA for a bit, and the news is good and bad like in most markets. Population growth for the 2005-2009 is estimated to be a somewhat weak 4%, though it is on an upswing.

We just ran numbers again the last week of June, and job growth (6 month rolling average) is running at 2.4% (strong given economic conditions) and unemployment is low for NOLA at 3.5%.

Multifamily occupancies are running sub-94%, and both the rental market and rental rate growth rates have been healthy. Single family is affordable (HAI 130.4), and the PMI Market Risk Index is low (1).

There's probably more opportunity down there than we've all been led to believe, but there are even stronger markets in LA than NOLA. Bottom line, it probably depends most on what you have in mind to consider in the market.