This article was originally published on nerej.com on February 2, 2024. As we move beyond the primary season, the focus on politics may wane for some, but in New Hampshire, the 2024 Legislature in Concord faces a considerable workload with over 1,300 bills awaiting consideration. The Public Policy Committee of the N.H. Association of Realtors (NHAR) is diligently reviewing these bills, identifying more than 100 that could potentially impact real estate agents and property owners. NHAR has a strong track record of protecting real estate licensure and property owners’ rights against encroachment ..read more

As we close in on the end of 2023, we are thinking about 2024 and what it will hold for the Real Estate industry. There appears to be a wide variety of views and a lot of interesting issues that will only become more evident as the year progresses. Construction In construction, specific kinds of materials are increasing or decreasing in costs. Some construction items have stabilized, while others are still fluctuating – and the increases and decreases are not specific to categories, but specific items. For instance, dimension lumber has dropped significantly, while sheet goods have stayed at t ..read more

The Placer.ai Nationwide Office Building Index: The office building index analyzes foot traffic data from 800 office buildings across the country. It only includes commercial office buildings and commercial office buildings on the first floor (like an office building that might include a national coffee chain on the ground floor). It does NOT include mixed-use buildings that are both residential and commercial. The “remote work war” continues to grab headlines, with employees speaking out against accumulating back-to-office mandates, and pundits weighing in o ..read more

COVID IMPACTS – TEMPORARY AND PERMANENT Moving is expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally and socially costly, so even a slight uptick in internal migration is significant. We saw a great deal of migration immediately after the shut down in 2020 as cities saw many of their residents, who were no longer tied to an office, move to smaller communities. When a small town sees an influx of newcomers, it can impact the way the community operates, the services it needs to provide, and the retail opportunities it presents. Small New England towns and cities saw many people arriving from NYC, B ..read more

Dear Respondent, It has been a while since there was any communication from the Liquor Commission or us as the brokers.  We have been busy during this time completing work on the zoning, and work on the Conservation Restriction on part of the property. We are pleased to report that there has been substantial progress completed to date. The zoning has been updated to reflect a new highway zone, specifically designed around the uses that were put forth by the respondents to the RFQ.  We are excited to report that most of those uses were adopted as a part of the zoning c ..read more

After another weekend get-together where my friends ask me “Should I buy or sell right now?”, I am left feeling that my economics degree and ‘fortune telling’ classes were not quite good enough for me to be giving hard and fast advice on this. I also think a 2000 word blog post saying that both might be true will not be worth your time to read. As someone who is in the market for buying a house, buying an investment property, owning a house that I could sell, and advising family about an owned commercial property to sell, I will tell you what I am doing, planning, and why. Current Situation Le ..read more

In New Hampshire, when a subdivision is proposed in just about any town or city, there is a “hue and cry” about the fact that it will put more kids in the school system, and that because of more kids, the costs of operations for the school district will increase – thereby increasing the taxes for all of the residents. Let’s look at this to see whether or not it actually is true, somewhat true, or false.  Invariably, when a subdivision or a new apartment complex is proposed, the first line of defense for those who oppose the project is the fact that it will fill the schools with children a ..read more

Multi-Family and apartments are still some of the hottest investment products in the commercial real estate market. In just New England (NE) this year there have been more units sold of Multi-Family than Self Storage, Senior Housing, Special Purpose, Mobile Home Parks, Retail, Office, Industrial, Land and Hotel/Motels combined! Even with a lower price per unit, apartments sales nearly exceed volumes of Office, Industrial and Retail combined as well. Seeing that the average price is lower than most of the other properties types and because of financing, it makes sense that more investors c ..read more

There are a lot of creative housing projects in the works in the New Hampshire seacoast and they all have a similar theme – increasing density.  It’s no secret that New Hampshire is experiencing a housing crisis. A severe lack of inventory has caused prices to surge, leaving both buyers and renters in a bind. From the Governor on down, across the board, the experts have been sounding the alarm on the lack of inventory, and several initiatives by the governor have been stalled by the legislature. In Portsmouth, developers have looked to increase density through condo and apartment dev ..read more

This is a very simple question that I wish was a simple rule of ‘x dollars per acre’, but there are so many different factors to consider in determining land value. Let’s take the following example in the community that one of our agents currently lives in, of Dover, New Hampshire. Here are three lots that are all about 50 acres: All these sites are relatively flat, are either raw wooded land or cultivated by an old farm, and have little to no structures on them. These all have access on the same road of Littleworth. It would be understandable why most people would think that t ..read more