ALBUQUERQUE MARKET IS STILL BOOMING!

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Retail Center Comes to West Side

By Rory McClannahan
Journal Staff Writer
The West Side will be getting a new retail and office center in the next couple of months.
Construction on the Shoppes at West Park, located on the northwest corner of Paradise and Eagle Ranch, will begin construction the first week in February, said Mike Novak, one of the center’s developers.
The center will have about 12,000 square feet of space. Novak said about half of the space has been leased, although he could not reveal what businesses would be moving in.
Novak did say, however, that the offices will be occupied by professional types of businesses, such as doctors, accountant and insurance agents. The 8,400 square feet of retail space will be occupied by mostly service businesses.
Novak said he expects the construction to take about four months.
NOT TOO LATE: If you didn’t get into the real estate market in 2005, it’s still not too late to buy in.
Despite predictions that the housing market bubble will pop this year, the market in the Albuquerque metro area, including the West Side, is looking good.
So good, in fact, that Fortune Magazine has rated the Albuquerque metro area as the 14th best market in the country for real estate.
Albuquerque came in first for metro areas in the West. The top 10 in the country are all in the South. That is misleading, however, because El Paso came in at No. 3 and it is nearly as far west as Albuquerque. The top metro area in the country is San Antonio, Texas. Las Vegas, Nev., came in at No. 100.
In its evaluation of the top 100 housing markets, Fortune is predicting that home prices in the Albuquerque metro area are likely to increase by 6.5 percent this year and another 6.1 percent in 2007.
In the West, Salt Lake City is the only other metro area expected to see a rise in home prices through 2007. The West was once a “paradise for speculators. But the chickens may be coming home to roost,” the magazine states.
If the predictions are true, homeowners in the Albuquerque metro area can expect higher returns on sales.