How GDP May Propel Boise Real Estate
The U.S. economy grew faster than initially thought in the fourth quarter as businesses drew down inventories at a much slower pace and boosted investment, a government report showed on Friday. Based on this good news, the Boise real estate market will be buoyed by the gains in economy.
In its second reading of fourth-quarter gross domestic product, the Commerce Department said the economy grew at a 5.9% annual rate, rather than the 5.7% pace it estimated last month. It was still the fastest pace since the third quarter of 2003. Posting an impressive 2.2% increase, the third quarter led all to date. If we go back to the 2003 number the Boise real estate market would be on solid footing.
In the winter period the GDP posted fore-casted growth of 5.7%, which indicates goods and services production totals, according to Reuters. With the recovery seemingly in full swing in the last few months of 2009, our nation seemed to be emerging from the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, but that growth has been stymied somewhat in the first quarter of 2010. Considering the housing slump and the low consumer confidence reports, businesses continued to reduce inventories to purchase needed software and equipment which all added up to a boost in fourth quarter numbers. This wan’t just a national trend either, as the Boise real estate market saw very similar changes in volume as well.
Demand remains low as indicated by the reduction in actual growth of 1.9% from the projected growth of 2.2%, which reduced inventories and brought some balance back. With inventory figures nearly halved, from $33.5 billion to $16.9 billion, the fourth quarter tailed off considerably. They dropped $139.2 billion in the July-September period. The change in inventories alone added 3.88 percentage points to GDP in the last quarter. Such a dramatic increase has not been seen since the final quarter of 1987. As home materials companies liquidated inventory, Boise real estate reaped some benefit from that.
As a whole, the year 2009 featured the most dramatic decrease in GDP, at 2.4%, since the post World War II recovery of 1946. Toward the end of 2009, consumer spending had to be reduced from the projected 2% to 1.7% in consumer spending. Although offset soon afterward, the “cash for clunkers” program drove GDP, by stimulating consumption, up by a respectable 2.8%. A huge block of our economy normally comes from consumer spending, around 70%, but in the fourth quarter of 2009 it only added a minuscule 1.23%. In such a financial crisis, the Boise real estate market is not independent of the national trends.
With spending on commercial real estate heading down quickly, the fact that the growth happened at all was due mostly because of equipment purchases and investment in software necessary for business growth and improvement. With business investment being much higher than the projected 2.9%, at 6.5% actually, improvement is on the way. In just the three months prior, it had slumped by just under 6%. With everyone watching the housing markets, projections of 5.7% were down graded to about 5% in the fourth quarter. In the third quarter it had posted a tremendous 18.9%. Both exports and imports grew much stronger than initially estimated in the fourth quarter, leaving a trade gap that contributed 0.3 percentage point to GDP growth, the data showed. As GDP indicates our national economic states, Boise real estate eagerly awaits is significant turn around.
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