Real estate agents in Charlotte are hoping last month's rate cut by the Federal Reserve will ignite home sales. So far, that hasn't happened. The number of sales closed in Mecklenburg County in September fell by nearly 9% compared with a year earlier, and that's according to the Canopy Realtor Association. For more on this, and other business stories, I'm joined now by Tony Mecia, of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter, for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: The rate cut just happened. Won't it take some time before it takes effect and for homes to start selling again?
Tony Mecia: Marshall, it will take some time. The Fed cut rates for the first time in several years in September. And these things don't just happen automatically. It's not like they cut the rates and all of a sudden the mortgage rates go down exactly in tandem. It takes a little while to work through the system. And as far as the selling and buying of homes, obviously that's a process that doesn't happen overnight. You make an offer on a house and you might not close on it for another month, so it's going to take probably a few months before some of that starts showing up in the data. But certainly, real estate agents are very hopeful that it will sort of revive the housing market, which has been a little bit slower because interest rates have been higher than they usually are.
Terry: Now, I mentioned at the beginning, the latest numbers show home closings in Mecklenburg County last month fell about 9% compared to last year. But you report there are some numbers that actually point to an imminent rise in home sales. What are they?
Mecia: Yeah, there are some other measures that you can kind of see the level of activity. Canopy Realtor Association does track, for example, new listings — you know, people when they put their houses on the market. And, they also track pending sales. Both of those were up 12%, so that's a sign that maybe some of these slightly lower mortgage rates are starting to kind of work their way through the system and that there is more activity on the way. But again, we're not going to know for probably a couple months before we see that data on the number of closings.
Terry: All right. Well let's go now to Pineville, where you report plans are moving forward to redevelop a historic mill. What do the plans call for? And, also, how many more historic mills do we have left to redevelop here? It seems like we've done a lot of that.
Mecia: There have been a lot of mill redevelopments in the Charlotte area. In Pineville, we're talking about the Cone Mills property, which is a 30-acre piece of land just south of Main Street in Pineville. It used to be a yarn mill, which was really the focus of the town. There are now plans by a private developer to buy the site, turn it into 162 townhomes — a mix of commercial space, areas for people to gather, that kind of thing. It's going to take a few years really to get off the ground because there are some environmental considerations there as it was a textile plant for a long time.
But it's one of many things going on in Pineville. There's a new fire station on the way. The downtown is very busy, like other areas in Charlotte, it's growing. There are other mills being redeveloped. You have the Savona Mill, north of uptown. Developers just finished a redevelopment of that. People might be familiar, of course, with Atherton Mill in South End. There a number of mills in the NoDa area that have been turned into apartments. You know, in other areas where there are mills, too. You look at Gaston County — former strong textile hub. You've seen some redevelopment projects there.
Terry: Let's end with an update to a story we talked about a few months ago. Longtime SouthPark restaurant Harper's closed over the summer, and the building has now been demolished. What's going there?
Mecia: It looks like it's going to be a Chase Bank. This is at Fairview and Sharon roads in SouthPark, right by there. And a lot of people say, 'Well, why are these always turning into banks? I thought we were doing mobile banking. I thought that was the big thing.' If you talk to bankers, they will say people still like to come into the bank — not necessarily to drop off deposits. But if you're signing a mortgage, or if you're making a big investment, something like that, you like that face-to-face contact. So we are seeing more of these banks take up prominent intersections, and this is the latest one on the way.
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