Aug
27
It’s easier to understand the tourism slump if you pay less attention to the percentage declines and more to the actual visitor numbers.
Canadian arrivals are up in double digit percentages, for example, but even now we get five or six visitors from Japan for every visitor from Canada.
Visitor traffic from all of Europe is half what we get from Canada. The same goes for visitors from the South Pacific.
Happy to have them, but even if it did a wildly successful marketing campaign in one of these places the short-term effect would barely make the meter move.
Most of our visitors, and most of our visitor traffic decline, comes from California. More of the decline than you might expect results from lack of cruise ship capacity.
The main point is this. If local hotels, or the state, were to spend millions of dollars in an emergency “come see us” campaign, where should it go and what should it say?
It should go in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which have the largest supply of empty airplane seats flying here, and very large numbers of people who already know Hawaii and would enjoy coming here and are not personally in any sort of economic jam.
The only reason they’re not already coming here is that they’ve been deterred by rising fares and the sheer hassle of getting here, followed by really high hotel room rates when they arrive. And, yes, some may be scared from what they see on CNBC even though they personally are still doing well.
So this is what we need to tell them:
- You know you need a Hawaii vacation.
- Don’t deny yourself, just when hotels are offering great deals.
Aug
26
New jobs in the military economy
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | Leave a Comment
Actus Lend Lease, which employs hundreds of people in Hawaii, has contracts to build or renovate hundreds of units of military housing, and then manage them. Contractors who want to support this effort have a chance to learn more about it this week.
Actus has hired 100 people in the past 18 months as it ramps up for phase two of a military housing project at Hickam which involves restoring the largest cluster of historic register homes to be found anywhere in the United States. But most of the work force will work for subcontractors.
For information:
http://www.hickamcommunityhousing.com/about_us/actus.asp
Hawaii businesses will get the vast majority of subcontractor and vendor business, the company says.
Actus can provide information about a job fair Friday for prospective contractors.
Aug
25
What trouble instead of a bubble?
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9 | Leave a Comment
For months I explained why Hawaii won’t have a housing bubble this time around, but what I didn’t know was what we would have instead. Now, I think I do know.
We will have a drawdown in housing prices caused by two factors, both related to the mortgage default crisis, and the result could be a window of affordability for people who have delayed becoming first-time homebuyers because they couldn’t afford anything decent.
Here are the two factors:
- Gravitational pull of declining West Coast prices. We’re a separate market, but part of our market is California buyers, and California buyers may find it difficult to pay $600,000 for Hawaii home X when they see a similar mainland home Y going for less despite also have a garage and a huge yard.
- As foreclosures increase, along with short sales (selling a house for a firesale price to AVOID foreclosure), current prices in some neighborhoods will become untenable. How can you insist on $600,000 for your home, X, when the home down the street, Y, is offered in foreclosure sale for $500,000?
There is not yet much evidence of these factors being in play much in Hawaii, doubtless in part because Hawaii has a really low foreclosure rate. But on the mainland it is estimated that more than a third of ALL home sales are now foreclosure sales, and that total foreclosure sales over the next year could top 2.5 million, or half of all the homes slated to be sold this year.
Any would-be first-time homebuyer who intends to have a shot at buying a home if prices ease further needs to start saving NOW. Pay down your credit card debt. Talk to a banker who will crunch numbers to figure out at what point you might actually qualify for a mortgage. Key factors will be your credit card debt and how secure your income in — not just how much, but how secure.
Posts
