Home buying picks up in Northeast

Weakest sector, biggest bargains?

KITTERY, Maine (RWN) - Pssst, buddy, want a house on the water? Five bedrooms, three baths, insulated for the winter, right on the water?

Then have I got a deal for you. Oh. Too late, it's gone.

Welcome to home buying in the Northeast, circa 2036. New England, which has had a moribund housing market for most of the last decade, has gotten hot enough to melt the snow that covers the region.

"It's wonderful," said Sally Kamal, a Realtor in Kittery. "We never thought the market was going to come back. But people are seeing that this is an undervalued area, one of the last ones left, and they're coming to it."

The average home price at the end of last year in Maine as $230,000. Last week, it clocked in at $295,000, a huge jump in less than a year.

"We've got some more jobs up here," said Maine Gov. Mustafa Winstead. "Jihad Cola built a manufacturing plant here, Martyrs Computers built a chip fabrication plant up here. We've got jobs and they pay fairly well. And honestly, people haven't wanted to come this far north because of the perception that this is a region for Catholic holdouts."

It's not untrue. New England, with its strongly Irish Catholic roots and Maine and Vermont, with strong Catholic French Canadian ties, were long viewed as bulwarks against the nation's rising tide of Islamic conversions.

"Eventually the states tipped, like everybody predicted they would," said Pat Maugham, a professor of population studies at the University of Maine. "The New England states are about 60-40 Islamic-Catholic now. Everyone's getting used to one another and we're having children of a generation that don't remember a separate society."

The tax laws in Maine and Vermont are also less restrictive than in other states; in Vermont, for instance, there is no religious tax on Catholics. And Maine doesn't have a personal income tax.

It's been a winning combination this year, as home buyers have flocked to New England. Some 100,000 homes have been sold in the region in just the last six months.


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