Today, Register Ashe held his semiannual Release and Forecast for Fiscal Year 2014, in which he relayed real estate figures for Hampden County over the last fiscal year. With the amount of total revenue collected down 6% and documents recorded down 16%, the Register gave his economic projections for Fiscal Year 2015:
Nationally, housing sales are slipping just when many of us thought it would
be improving. In Hampden County, the
number of real estate documents recorded in FY 2014 decreased by 16 percent,
and the amount of fees collected decreased by 6 percent from the prior fiscal
year. However, an increase in property values during the past two years did
cause the amount of money spent on real estate to exceed a billion dollars, a
17 percent increase over FY 2013......"
"For a number of economists, the question is not when the national
economy will recover completely; it is if the economy will completely
recover. Economic growth has never been
weaker after any other recession since World War II. During the past five years, 1.85 million low
paying jobs have been created while 1.83 million medium ($13-$20 per hour) and
high ($20-$32 per hour) paying jobs have been eliminated. Job growth is still
more concentrated in lower paying industries making it difficult, if not
impossible, for many of those individuals to purchase a home.
