Not so fast, my friend.

Sure, the national unemployment numbers are still tough to swallow.  And yes, we are still seeing more vacant store fronts popping up.  Discretionary spending is off, too, though you have to wonder when you see folks descend on a mall and drop hundreds of dollars on trivial junk for Christmas.

But here in Cape May County, New Jersey at the shore, the tide has turned in the real estate market.  Pun intended.  With interest rates hovering around 4% and prices nearly half of what they were in 2005, sales have been brisk.  We’re also seeing that folks are tired of sitting on the sidelines and after five years they ackowledge the opportunity is there to finally purchase and own a vacation home at the Jersey Shore.  If they were 55 years old back in 2005, they’re now 60 and not getting any younger.  I call it the “now or never” syndrome.  If they waited much longer to buy a second home, some would probably just say forget it.

Back in 2004, we began telling our clients that the days of buying pre-construction condos, then flipping them a year later the day after closing, were over.  We saw an overabundance of new construction and sensed that the market was shifting.  Unfortunately, we were right.  We are getting that same feeling again, except this time it’s a turn in the other direction. 

We believe that the vacation home market leads the way.  Our real estate market was the first to fall apart, and it is the first to recover.  And why not?  Folks who can afford second homes usually own their own business or they are high enough up on the corporate ladder to have a solid income.  When the national media began their gloom and doom predictions, the frugal upper and upper-middle class folks pulled back and stopped spending.  Now that they’ve endured five years of a recession and the sky hasn’t fallen in, they’re back.

Here at Jewell Real Estate Agency, we have sold 2.5 times more properties this year than in 2009.  We’re not bleeding greenbacks anymore.  Not only are we relieved, we’re very optimistic.  No doubt, it will take the primary home market another two years to catch fire.  But when it does, all will be well in Whoville.

- Mountain Man

I feel qualified to have an opinion about the Jersey Shore (the place, not the show) because, heck, I live here.  Our real estate office is located in Wildwood Crest, Cape May County.  We’re just four blocks from the beach and the beginning of the 39 city block long Boardwalk.  From Memorial Day to Labor Day, the population on our island swells from 14,000 yearround to over 250,000.

Our closest metropolitan area is Philadelphia.  It’s predominantly Italian and Irish heritage.  And it’s a rite of passage for families and their kids to vacation here.  It’s also an unofficial “tradition” that kids in their late teens and twenties come here in the summer to party.  Party hard!  Party hard away from their elders, out of sight of those who might inflict family repercussions.

I have a little more insight than most because I also owned a bar here from 2002 through 2004.  Though my tavern was off the beaten track and it attracted an older (30 to 75) crowd, I did become acquainted with many other bar owners and I did make the late night rounds more than once.

Long story short, I recently did catch two episodes of Jersey Shore.  It’s about these eight Italian-American young twenty-somethings who come to the shore town of Seaside Heights, NJ, about 50 miles north of us.  They have an assortment of MTV-generation names like Snooki, JWoWW, and The Situation.  The Situation?  Give me a break.

Anyway, they primp and argue at their rented beach house, then go out and drink and carouse, and inevitably come home and be promiscious with a newfound partner.  They call it “hooking up”.  You can call it what you like.

They also get into fights and do other immature, egotistical things.  They are an extreme example of typical summertime behavior.  Tone it down a little bit and they’re just like the others who go “Animal House” at the shore.

The Italian-American groups call Jersey Shore demeaning and not reality.  “That’s not how our kids act,” is their general feeling. 

Bottom line: 

Is this behavior the norm at the shore in the summertime?  Yes.  It’s called “sowing your oats” before settling down to a lifetime of responsibility and 2.3 kids and a soccer-mom vehicle and a mortgage.

Should Italian-American groups be offended?  No.  Get over it.  It’s also Irish-American kids and CEO’s kids and teachers’ kids and mayors’ kids.  And your kids!

- Mountain Man and City Girl    http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com 

The blogsite of Jewell Real Estate Agency, Wildwood Crest, NJ    http://www.JewellRealEstateAgency.com

The next growing season it spread some via an underground root system.  Again, the purple flowers were beautiful.  By the next year, it was springing up nearly ten feet from where I planted the first one.  Still, I figured it had just about used up the open area and it would not keep spreading.

Then one morning in July I opened up the morning newspaper and there was a story about an invasive plant that had been imported from Asia.  The accompanying picture left me speechless – it was my little purple-flower plant.  The more I read the story, the more I realized I had to dig this perennial plant right up and destroy it.

Now, two years later, I think I finally have seen the last of this bugger.  It seems everytime I thought it was all dug up, another shoot would spring up elsewhere.

It is estimated that there are 50,000 alien species in the United States, and they do $138 billion damage to the US economy.  The biggest problem is that many of these foreigners have no natural pests or diseases here to keep them in check.  So they spread like wildfire, choking out native species.  Since one plant species in an area supports about 10 animal species, a monoculture of one plant can substantially reduce animal habitat and diversity.

Some of the invasive plant species in New Jersey – many planted by well-meaning landscapers – are the Norway maple, Japanese barberry, Asian bittersweet, English ivy, mimosa, wisteria, Japanese honeysuckle, bamboo, and day lily.  Geez, we have four of those right in our yard.  Who knew?  Even the multiflora rose (planted along highways) and crown vetch (to stabilize hillsides) are foreigners.

In Avalon, an upscale shore community here, they planted Japanese black pines back in the 1960′s to help stabilized the shifting sands of the dunes.  Little did they realize how quickly they would grow, pushing out native species.  And with pine needles eventually coating the ground underneath them, that area became barren.

Avalon is now cutting out the dead black pines and pruning all the lower branches of the live ones.  They will be replaced by native species – Eastern red cedar, black cherry, wax myrtle, and Northern bayberry – which all can perform the same role of stabilizing the sand.  It’s a win-win.

With spring just two months away, the ground will soon begin revealing a new crop of summer plants at our home.  I better keep my shovel ready just in case any of those Asian purple-flower plants show up.

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Case in point.  Along the Delaware Bay in the Villas section of Lower Township, Cape May County, three homes and two utility poles are being threatened by beach erosion.  A combination of last year’s uncommonly excessive rainfall – 62 inches compared to the normal 44 - and windy, stormy conditions during some of those rain events has caused the Delaware River to eat away nearly 20 feet of 6-foot high dunes.

The homeowners submitted an emergency application to the NJDEP to build a seawall at their own expense.  That’s right, they’d pay for the thing themselves.

“No way”, was NJDEP’s reply.  You see, NJDEP is still hung up on beach replenishment.  So despite the fact that the murky, churning Delaware Bay is within five feet of the corner of one home, NJDEP wouldn’t budge.  They want sand put back to rebuild the dune.  Or else leave it alone and presumably some high tide will take out the homes.

Then a new problem arose.  The beach is owned by Lower Township, not the property owners.  Lower wasn’t about to foot the bill, so they turned to good old FEMA – the Federal Emergency Management Agency – to fund the beach replenishment.  Who knows how long that bureaucracy of red tape will take?  Plus, they fund beaches on the Atlantic Ocean side of the county, where tourists flock.  The only flock on this beach are red knots, laughing gulls, sandpipers, and such.

But the issue, in reality, is that NJDEP dropped the ball in the beginning.  Their mission – since they became the country’s third DEP back on the original Earth Day on April 22, 1970 –  is to “manage natural resources and solve pollution problems”.  What better way to manage this resource than to let the property owners install a bulkhead, then storms and natural sediment movement will put a beach back, gratis.  Everybody gets what they want.

But that’s common sense, a term that usually can’t be used in the same sentence as NJDEP.

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Pennsylvania will now permit up to 250 table games in larger casinos and up to 50 in smaller resort casinos.  Table games are poker, baccarat, blackjack, roulette, craps, and similar games of chance.  The cost of licensing is $16.5 million for the large casinos and $7.5 million for resort casinos, which is a drop in the bucket in the scope of the big picture.  The 14 casinos in the state should add an additional $250 million per year to state coffers.

Atlantic City, the No.2 casino city in the United States after Las Vegas, has seen reduced revenues for over a year, putting an added strain on New Jersey’s already bloated budget deficit.  The monopoly Atlantic City once enjoyed on gambling on the East Coast is ancient history.

Connecticut has three Indian casinos that allow slots and table games, making them the first to cut into Atlantic City’s lucrative market.  West Virginia was next, first having slots at two dog tracks and two horse tracks, then adding table games in 2007.  They recently granted a full gambling license to the infamous Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs.

Delaware has one poker venue in Wilmington, plus video poker and slots at the three “racinos”, as they call their race tracks with legal gambling.  It won’t be long before table games are installed in each of the sites.

So what is Atlantic City to do?  They will lose much of their Philadelphia area gamblers once the table games open next November or so.  Delaware’s table games will debut around the same time.  No doubt entrepreneurs will add restaurants and resort hotels near the casinos, further damaging Atlantic City’s bottom line.

Atlantic City will need to take advantage of what it’s already got for the dozen casinos, employing 36,000 workers, to be profitable.  That means marketing non-gaming venues.  Upscale, fashionable restaurants with trendy surroundings are already a big draw, as are the 200 retail, brand name, and outlet stores.

Atlantic City also has big name entertainers going for it.  Not a night goes by that the city doesn’t feature a dozen acts targeting every age group.  Glitzy, nouveau nightclubs, with a regular parade of celebrity sightings, is turning AC into a mecca for the 21-40 year old crowd.  And they have bucks to spend.

AC also offers championship boxing matches, plus those new martial art/kick boxing/in-a-cage fights.  There’s also college basketball, including the Atlantic 10 tournament each March.

Last but not least, there’s the beach.  Geez, no other casino in neighboring states has the sparkling white sands and bikini babes.  And the beach is a great place to watch an air show or fireworks or lifeguard competitions or throw a frisbee or ….

Well, maybe Atlantic City should be saying, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  Time will tell.

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

But should their job be iffy, it’s better to sit this one out.  Why buy a vacation home if in the next year it becomes too much of a financial burden and they end up in foreclosure.  Not only will their credit be ruined, but their shore experience will leave a lasting negative impression and they may never enter the second home market again, even in good times.

Their are currently 15.4 million unemployed Americans and the jobless rate is hovering around 10%.  As always, these numbers do not include folks who have literally given up on ever getting a job and dropped out of the work force.  A record 5.9 million Americans have been out of work at least a half year as 7 million jobs have disappeared since the recession began.

The normal unemployment rate is about 5.5%.  Experts expect that the rate won’t return to that range until 2015 or so.  Job creation is the key.  In the last 10 years, from 1999 to 2009, the net gain in jobs is only about a half million, thanks to the loss of those 7 million jobs.  The previous 10 years, 1989 to 1999, saw 21 million jobs created.

Another factor in the job market is that many Baby Boomers are not retiring, but instead are staying in the work force in order to afford to live more comfortably.  This leaves the younger and less-skilled workers on the short end of the stick.

So what to do? 

The federal government needs to create jobs.  The recent infusion of money into infrastructure, mostly highways, really didn’t employ that many people.  Material costs – asphalt, concrete, steel, heavy equipment, etc. – ate up much of that cash infusion. 

Roosevelt had his Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which pulled many through the depression by creating labor-intensive jobs (meaning more people than machines).  Why not get something like that rolling, where people of all skill levels can clean up roadsides, do much-needed maintenance work at state and national parks, thin underbrush in the forest fire-prone West.

Let’s prioritize solar, wind, and water power, offering generous subsidies and tax breaks to companies that manufacture and install these alternative power sources.  And let’s clean up urban blight, by demolishing abandoned buildings and clearing vacant lots.  That could be followed by building urban housing – but not “housing projects” – that would not only create jobs but upgrade people’s living standards.

When the government coordinates with private enterprises to create jobs, our economy will turn around in a heartbeat.  It’s that simple.  Are we asking for too much?

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Being a second home market, our yearly calendar of sales activity is fairly predictable.  By that I mean that just like a school year starts and ends around the same time each year and school vacations are scheduled about the same weeks each year, our business also has regular busy and quiet times.

Our real estate market usually cools off each year about 10 days before Thanksgiving and that semi-hibernation lasts through New Years Day.  That’s a time when local realtors takes cruises and warm weather vacations or work shorter days and cut to a minimum of floor time.  In the past, some real estate agencies even closed from Christmas Eve through January 1st, though not us.

Because that six week period is fairly predictable, any decrease or increase in potential buyer volume is a good barometer of the condition of our local real estate market.  We can gauge fairly accurately what type of year we are about to have by how many email and phone inquiries, plus walk-in traffic, we get during that time period.  It’s sorta like the Groundhog predicting more winter or not, if you get my drift.

Which brings us to this year’s prognostication. 

We were busier than usual leading right up to Thanksgiving Day, then the trend continued right up through Christmas Eve.  The day after Christmas (yesterday), the phone and email inquiries were brisk.  We’ll be juggling property showings all week long.  Hurray!

While perhaps not very scientific, our real estate business indicator is predicting a good 2010.  What more can we ask?

- Mountain Man and City Girl

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Meanwhile, the “Little Engine That Could” plodded on, eventually erecting 13 casinos.  The first, Resorts Atlantic City, opened in May, 1978.  A year later Caesars debuted, then in December 1979 Bally’s opened.  The Sands, Harrahs and the Hilton each opened in the latter half of 1980 and the Playboy Casino and Tropicana were ready for business in late 1981.   Atlantic City now had eight casinos.

 The recession of the early 1980s (sound familiar) halted construction while prospective casino companies sat out the downturn and waited for the economy to get going again.

Trump Plaza got things moving again, opening in May, 1984, then Trump Marina debuted a year later.  The Showboat opened in 1987 and the Trump Taj Mahal in 1990 and then new construction came to a halt.  Time to once again wait for better times.

In 2003, the first modern mega-casino, the Borgata, opened to grand revues and it continues to this day to be the top earner in the city.  The Playboy Club Casino, of course, has long since been closed, then torn down. 

The Sands was torned down in 2007 by Pinnacle Entertainment after purchasing the obsolete casino and its 20 Boardwalk/oceanfront acres for $400 million.  Pinnacle has not begun construction and the company refuses to comment if the $1.5 billion megaresort will ever be built.

Meanwhile, MGM and Boyd Entertainment purchased a 72-acre lot next to the Borgata, envisioning a 3,000 hotel room, 280,000 square foot casino resort to be called the MGM Mirage.  Plans for that project are “on hold” until the economy improves and funding becomes available.

One new Atlantic City hotel casino, the Revel, is about two-thirds through the construction phase.  They broke ground in November, 2007, but in January, 2009 had to lay off 400 workers, leaving 500 to get the steel work and exterior completed.  They need another $1 billion in funding to finish the $2.5 billion project, which is still hopefully scheduled to open in the summer of 2011.  The Revel is 53 stories high, with 1,800 rooms, 20 restaurants, 40 retail stores, and a 5,000-seat theater, plus 150,000 square feet of gambling.

Atlantic City reacted to gambling being legalized in many more states by improving its non-gambling options for visitors.  Shopping opportunities within walking distance of the casinos include the 27-store The Quarter, The Walk with 47 stores, and the Piers at Caesars with over 50 stores.

However, the approval of gambling in Pennsylvania poses a new threat.  The casinos in AC once employed 40,000 people, but that’s now down to 36,000.  Gambling competition also comes from nearby Delaware, New York, and the Indian casinos in Connecticut.

Atlantic City must once again reinvent itself.  The more non-gaming options the better.  The city owns 140-acre Bader Field, a former small airport, just outside of town but practically in the shadow of the casinos.  Maybe a theme park or something similar is the answer.  Whatever, it has to be a FAMILY destination.

If the casinos are to prosper, they must break their long-standing tradition of not supporting anything outside walking distance of their establishments.  Minor league baseball didn’t fly, and pro hockey and basketball were also financial flops.  The casinos must get behind some sort of grand family entertainment at Bader Field.  If not, their market share will continue to drop and Atlantic City, within a four hour drive of 30 million people, will be the punchline of many a joke.

- Mountain Man

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Fannie CEO Michael Williams and Freddie CEO Ed Haldeman each received $900,000 in salary and another $3.1 million in salary with payments deferred to 2010.  That’s $4 million apiece.  Each also is eligible for another $2 million in performance incentives.  Considering that Fannie and Freddie needed a combined $111 billion, yes billion, in federal bailout money, one wonders exactly what their performance bonus was contingent upon.  Perfect attendance?  Turning their homework in on time?  Spelling their names correctly?

The argument by their cheerleaders is that the former CEO’s of the two companies, who were both fired in September, 2008 when the bailout money was proposed, made a lot more money.  The Fannie CEO received $10.2 million in 2008 and the Freddie guy nailed $13.1 million.  It practically took an act of Congress to stop them from awarding themselves another combined $24 million in termination pay.

The case for Williams and Haldeman continues that each would command up to $10 million in yearly pay in the private sector.  The argument typically concludes with, “No one else would do the job for less money.”

Bullfeathers!

I’ll do the job for one year for a measly $500,000.  I’ll move to Washington, DC for one year, rent a condo, and work 365 straight days.  A lot of qualified people would do the same thing.  And I’ll donate $100,000 of that money to DC soup kitchens for the homeless.  That would make my take home pay about $250,000.  Not extravagant, but fair!

I really get tired of hearing how top company management and all government workers – federal, state, and municipal – feel justified in making a lot more money than their small business and working stiff counterparts because, “No one else would take this job.”  And the benefits they receive, including health insurance and retirement packages, are way beyond reasonable and equitable.

Is anybody mad yet?

- Mountain Man

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com

Tejon Ranch is the largest private land holding in California, measuring around 270,000 acres, or over 400 square miles.  The massive Kern County tract had not been viewed by the public for 140 years.  The property is located along the main north-south route on the West Coast, Interstate 5, situated 60 miles north of Los Angeles and 30 miles south of Bakersfield.  It is at the confluence of four ecosystems – the Mojave Desert, Sierra Nevada Mountains, Central Valley, and South Coast, so it is a wildlife corridor of magnificent proportions.

Last May, the Tejon Ranch Company penned an agreement with five of the most important environmental groups – including the Sierra Club and Audubon Society – to set aside permanently 90% of the property.  So far, 178,000 acres have been established as Open Space or a conservancy, with an option on 62,000 acres more at fair market value.

What the Tejon Ranch gets is the unhindered ability to develop part of the remaining land, which is all located along I-5 at the western edge of the ranch.  They already have tenants in parts of the 1,450-acre Tejon Industrial Complex, including IKEA with a 1.7 million square foot warehouse.  Oneida and Famous Footwear also call the complex home.

Tejon Mountain Village, which developers hope will eventually contain 23,000 homes and 70,000 people in 18.4 square miles of newly-hatched city, was just approved October 5th by the Kern County Board of Supervisors.  There will also be resorts and golf courses, plus hiking and equestrian trails in this “environmentally sensitive mountain resort community”.

Within the preserved portions of Tejon Ranch the bears, bobcats, mountain lions, pronghorn antelope, and more will be able to continue to roam free amongst the many diverse habitats.  The Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from the Canadian to Mexican borders, will shift 39 of its miles to the breathtaking Ranch, something previously only dreamed of.

The Tejon Ranch concept, which will create 1,500 additional permanent jobs and 1,600 construction jobs, appears to be a win-win for everyone concerned.  Isn’t it great when there is intelligent compromise that both spurs the economy and preserves our precious earth?

- Mountain Man

http://www.MountainManandCityGirl.com