The Hansen Ohana went to see Hawaii economist Paul Brewbaker from Bank of Hawaii on July 21^st. The notes from the talk are below:

Real Estate has been slowing for 2 years so far.

Inventory has been building for 2 years and is piling on.

Land sales usually spike in March for the last 10 years except for this year. We have no idea what this means.

Number of home sales have been declining for 3 years.

Median home price started to up lift in 1999 and now we are leveling off.

Oahu it is actually declining slightly but Maui prices are not expected to decline but stay level for a couple of years.

Maui should continue to trade at a premium $725,000 for Maui $630,000 for Oahu.

Highest median home prices by area:

1. San Jose

2. San Francisco

3. Anaheim

4. Honolulu

5. San Diego

Mean home price sale prices increase on average 8% before 1980 and 4.5% since then

We are above the line a little now so it will have to be flat for a couple years to catch up.

There is no bubble just a small correction.

Average home price for June on Maui $999,000

“Higher order moments” are strong real estate buying signals, which were very high from 1999 to 2004. Higher order moments are down to normal now but not expected to get low.

High-end homes usually move first.

Low-end homes usually play catch-up during a recovery.

Long-term inflation expectations reduced because of more credible monetary policy

Volatility of residential investment is moderated into the future

Interest rate cycle.

Core inflation measure is 2.5 in 2001 and went down to 1 in 2003 and now is going back to 2.5. This is the US CPI. The fed target is 2% for CPI.

Regarding trouble in the Middle East. “So what else is new”. It should not affect us unless something major happens.

There will be normal inflation into the future with continued moderate interest rates.

Notes from Bob Hansen

You can now search for properties on the other islands as well. Today we have added The Big Island & Kauai sections. We should have the Oahu section up and running within 3 weeks, if all goes well.

The vacation rentals section is working again, thanks to Juerg at maui.net & the developers of your PHP Vacation rental system. All the other little bugs in our MLS search appear to have been fixed as well. The new server feels much faster, at least for me.

Just some background info: Maui.net moved our domain to a new server, because the server that our domain was on, kept crashing and as a result, our website was unreachable for hours at a time. Problem solved.

Sorry about the Vacation Rentals Section being down today. Our web hosting provider moved us to a newer & faster server, which caused a small glitch. We hope to have it back up again by Thursday afternoon. Thanks for your patience.

Good news! Besides being able to see which condos can be vacation rented in the search results, we have also updated our Advanced Search Form so that you can now perform a search to include only the vacation rentable condos. Previously it was impossible to distinguish which condominiums could be rented short term, and which could not.

In the property detail, we also now show if the unit is a whole or fractional ownership. Hopefully, this will clear up confusion when it appears that a multi-million dollar unit seems so inexpensive.