Everywhere, it seems, except Pittsburgh.
"U.S.
home prices continued to plunge in April," screeched
a recent business-news headline. According to one
well-regarded index, in 20 cities around the nation,
prices dropped that month by more than 15 percent
from the previous April.
In
Pittsburgh, though, prices held steady. RealSTATS, a
firm that tracks property sales in southwestern
Pennsylvania, reports that in the Pittsburgh region,
housing prices dipped only slightly from April 2007.
With a median price of $112,000, homes were selling
for more than they had two years before.
"We heard
that there was a recession, but we decided not to
participate," one industry professional joked in the
report.
"I think
a lot of times people hear the national headlines,
and they don't realize it's a different story here,"
agrees Chris Briem, an economist and numbers guru at
the University of Pittsburgh. "Right now, our
real-estate market doesn't look like elsewhere."
For one
thing, foreclosure rates are far lower: In early
2008, for example, the number of foreclosures
nationwide more than doubled over the year before;
in the Pittsburgh region, the number of foreclosures
dropped slightly.
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