Now that Hurricane Irene has blown over and most of the general hysteria has subsided (but as the Boy Scouts always say – you should always “be prepared,” but let’s be honest, are you feeling just a tiny tinge of buyer’s remorse now that you’re well stocked with canned food and flashlights?), we thought it would be interesting to see what the impact was on house hunting. To do this, we looked at the number of people visiting Trulia.com from the 15 states along Hurricane Irene’s path. When we compared the volume of window shopping that happened last, last weekend with this past weekend, we found some pretty dramatic drops in the hardest hit states.
(Hurricane Irene’s path –Visualization Video by NOAA)
What Do The People In Connecticut And Jersey Have In Common?
Normally, these two states couldn’t be more different, but this past weekend, both had really close encounters with Hurricane Irene as she made her way up the East Coast. Now the folks in Connecticut and New Jersey (and a few others) are facing severe power outages and floods, which makes looking at homes for sale probably the farthest thing on everyone’s mind. In a single week, the volume of online house hunting in these two states fell by a whopping 29% and 25% respectively. To put this in perspective, Californians – being pretty far removed from Hurricane Irene’s path – remained undeterred, having only decreased their real estate window shopping by a measly 1%.
Looking at the chart below, you’ll see that the drops were biggest in the hardest hit states.
| # | Hurricane Hit States | W-O-W % Δ (House Hunting Activity on Trulia) |
| 1 | Connecticut | -29% |
| 2 | New Jersey | -25% |
| 3 | Virginia | -18% |
| 4 | Vermont | -18% |
| 5 | Massachusetts | -17% |
| 6 | Maryland | -17% |
| 7 | Delaware | -17% |
| 8 | Maine | -17% |
| 9 | New York | -13% |
| 10 | Rhode Island | -13% |
| 11 | Pennsylvania | -13% |
| 12 | Washington D.C. | -13% |
| 13 | New Hampshire | -12% |
| 14 | North Carolina | -8% |
| 15 | South Carolina | -6% |
While Hurricane Irene will unlikely have a direct impact on housing values in the long run, it has definitely hampered the last weekend of the summer home buying and selling season. All in all, this is just bad news bears … but wait, there’s more. According to the latest news reports, Tropical Storm Katia is just hours away from becoming a full-blown hurricane. Right now, it’s still too early to say where she’s headed, let’s just hope she’s a little more benign.
Side questions for our readers on the East Coast: Agents, did you have to cancel your open house this weekend? And house hunters, did you do a rain check on visiting homes for sale?
