Is Charlotte’s housing market finally cooling?

Growth is still the story of Charlotte, but as the economy muddles along, some of that growth and stratospheric home prices might be cooling off. Still, there's plenty of reason for optimism, and several classrooms-worth of people moving here every day, according to the latest statistics. 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: Home prices in Charlotte did something unusual in June. They fell for the second straight month, according to the Canopy Realtor Association. Does this mean the market is cooling?

Tony Mecia: Well, some realtors say it seems to be cooling a little bit and the statistics seem to back that up. The median sales price of a house in Mecklenburg County was $467,000 in June. That's still obviously not cheap, but it is down 2.7% from a year earlier.

The previous month, it had fallen 1.7% from the previous year. This is after about 18 months of straight increases in home prices. I talked to some realtors and they say it reflects maybe sort of a summer slowdown. A lot of people are not looking as much at houses, and they say it might be a good market or at least a better market for buyers now than it was.

Terry: Real estate development isn't just a secular pursuit. Let’s talk about some church-related development. The Catholic Diocese of Charlotte appears to be slowing down its plans for a new cathedral. What’s behind that? And where is the cathedral planned to go?

Mecia: The Catholic diocese covers 46 counties in the western half of North Carolina. It had announced plans a year or so ago to build a new cathedral because the existing cathedral at St. Patrick's in Dilworth is pretty small. Now they hadn't announced a site for that cathedral. They determined that it was going to cost a lot of money.

It's going to be about $100 million. And when they checked on it with the Vatican, the Vatican apparently said, ‘hey, you might need to slow that down.’ And so what they're going to do instead, they're looking at a capital campaign to raise maybe as much as $150 million that would go toward needs throughout the diocese and then sort of putting the cathedral project maybe a little bit lower down in their priorities.

Terry: The Charlotte Regional Business Alliance is preparing a multimillion-dollar campaign to build support for a sales tax hike to fund transit plans. The referendum on that is expected to be just a little over three months away. What do we know about the referendum's chances and what the CRBA is doing to support it?

Mecia: Business North Carolina reported last week that the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance is planning to raise $3 million in support of the transit tax referendum, which as we know, would go toward expanding roads and expanding transit options. They've hired some consultants — a bipartisan group of consultants, communications consultants. They've also supposedly commissioned a poll that shows that the referendum would pass by about 50% to 40%. That's a little bit closer than I think they had wanted, but I think if you talk to the backers of the transit tax referendum, they say they're pretty optimistic about their chances.

Terry: Finally, there's a new number for the region's population growth we'll all have to start remembering. It's 157 people a day moving to the Charlotte region. This is one of those numbers that's thrown around so much, you wonder if we'll get a running population counter on a digital clock like Atlanta. Where did 157 come from, and what does this number actually mean?

Mecia: In a speech this week to the Rotary Club of Charlotte, Tracy Dodson, the chief operating officer of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, said that they had crunched the numbers and that they now show 157 people a day moving to the Charlotte region. The number for last year was 117. This is based on an analysis of census data. It’s worth pointing out most of that growth is occurring in the counties surrounding Charlotte.

Mecklenburg County accounts for about 40% of that growth, but the region as a whole is also growing, and it's a net migration number. This is the number of people moving to the region minus the number of people leaving. That doesn't include births and deaths, but it is a pretty big number. This is a number that's looked at by developers and people in the real estate industry to just illustrate the rapid growth that we have and sort of what we need to do to address those challenges.

Support for BizWorthy comes from the law office of Robertson and Associates.