That's not to say that we are immune from the "outside world's" activities, by any means, but things are certainly different across the bridge. An article in today's Boston Globe business section reported that housing starts had declined again and represented the weakest reading since 1991.
The article jogged my memory to a visit to Southern New Jersey 15 years ago for a golf outing. The event was held at a relatively new course, a beautiful layout in an area only about 15 miles from Philadelphia as the crow flies. There was nothing around the course except for vacant land consisting of woods and farmland.
Fast forward to 2001, when I next visited the same golf course. A lot had happened in 8 years. Gone were the vast, open tracts of land, and in the place of the emptiness were hundreds, if not thousands of homes. It was not the development that surprised me, but rather the kind of development that had occurred and the prices that these single family homes were fetching. 3,000+ square foot homes on "postage stamp" lots, hardly any yard, and an abutter's exterior side wall less than 10 paces away from each and every home. Every home looked the same, from style to color to siting on the lot. And these homes were selling for just south of $1,000,000 apiece. It was then that I realized how very different our Cape Cod real estate market is from the real world out there.
There is just so little developable land remaining in our area, to the extent that we consider a large development to be anything more than a 10-lot project, and even those are scarce. We have a very limited commodity here on the lower Cape, and we should be grateful that our lack of supply and generally strong demand act as buffers to the larger swings in the broader real estate markets.
As I said, we are not immune, but the draw to our special place continues despite the conditions that exist across the canal and way beyond.
