Rick Haase | Residential
President, Latter & Blum, Inc.
Rick Haase oversees the operations and strategic direction of the Latter & Blum, Inc.’s family of companies. The company, which includes more than 30 residential and commercial offices throughout Louisiana, Texas and Southern Mississippi, completes approximately 15,000 real estate transactions annually while operating successful mortgage, insurance and title and escrow service companies.
Haase has been active in brokerage and management since 1978. He currently serves on local, state and national boards including: United Way, Greater New Orleans Inc., the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, Greater New Orleans, Inc., Project Upstream, Inc. and the Real Estate Services Providers Council.
How would you describe the state of the residential real estate market in the greater New Orleans area, both in terms of housing and rentals?
The residential market in greater New Orleans is truly a tale of two cities: we have the bellwether markets like Garden District, Uptown, Lakefront and West St. Tammany all doing very well, with the hottest of the markets being Garden District and Uptown. These two markets are extremely inventory constrained, especially in the sub $500,000 price range. This scarcity has caused an abnormal price increase. For instance, even though we only experienced a 1 percent increase in the number of closed sales taking place (in Garden/Uptown ) during a rolling 12 month period, we have seen an almost 15 percent increase in total sales volume due to rapid price increases on a per-sale basis.
This lack of availability has also created winners in close by neighborhoods, as we have seen buyers instead purchasing in Mid-City, Lakefront and the Bywater/Marigny markets.
Conversely, the markets are showing steady but essentially flat home sales in East St Tammany. The river parishes have seen very lackluster sales numbers by comparison.
Where do you see the market going? Have we peaked or is this a new baseline?
Overall, the housing market continues at a strong pace and we expect that we will likely finish out at 5 to 6 percent overall growth in sales volume activity, with half of the growth coming from price increases and the other half from a higher number of residential sales.
What do you think is the hottest upcoming neighborhood/market?
In terms of overall activity, they remain the Garden District, Uptown, Mid-City, Bywater/Marigny, West St Tammany and Lakefront.
Millennial buyers are wanting to live closer to the city, and as rental rates have risen to record highs, more and more of these buyers are realizing that they can change the financial trajectory of their lives by purchasing and growing equity in something rather than paying rent. We are already seeing significant movement into the purchase market. The last available numbers are that the net worth of a United States home owner is 41 times that of an apartment renter. There is a very causal relationship between those facts.
Driving our markets forward are two huge factors: one being tremendous pent up demand as household formations continue to grow and home ownership costs remain affordable relative to incomes. Additionally, mortgage financing is cheap today and has become more and more available the further we get away from the 2008 financial crisis and the resultant over-tightening of mortgage financing requirements.
What are the challenges for residential, moving forward?
Challenges will continue to be trying to buy in a very low inventory market and economic uncertainties relating to the energy sector — particularly unemployment rates in the all-important oil fields and oil services industry.
