Trends in Real Estate sessions promise ‘a lot of good news’ about local real estate market | Business

The annual Trends in Real Estate seminar, which features local experts providing forecasts for various sectors of the Baton Rouge real estate market, will be Thursday.

While interest rates may be on the rise, Steve Legendre, president of the Greater Baton Rouge Association of Realtors’ Commercial Investment Division, said there’s “a lot of good news” in the local real estate market.

After the problems caused over the past two years by the COVID-19 pandemic and snarled supply chains, businesses, especially retailers, realized that they could survive even if the worst happened.

“They know they’ll make money in bad times as well as good times,” Legendre said.

Banks are willing to lend to commercial owner-occupants, especially for health care uses. “At this point, a bump of half a point in interest rates is not the end of the world,” he said.

The rising rates are having an impact on the market for single-family homes and apartments, areas that are sensitive to increased costs for borrowing, Legendre said. If it costs more money to get a loan to build apartments or buy a complex, that cuts in to how much investors can pay.

The higher rates have even more of an impact on homebuying, because people are trying to maximize how much they can spend on a home, Legendre said.

The Trends seminar started in 1988 as a joint project of the commercial and investment division and LSU’s Real Estate Research Institute. The goal of the program is to educate members of the division, their clients and other real estate practitioners in the greater Baton Rouge area about what is going on in the local real estate market.

KC Conway, chief economist for the CCIM Institute, a commercial real estate organization, will be the keynote speaker.

Conway is someone who follows real estate trends nationally and with an eye on the South, Legendre said. “He’ll be able to talk about our market and how it compares to other markets of a similar size,” he said.

The seminar will be in the events center at the L’Auberge Casino & Hotel Baton Rouge. Registration begins at 7 a.m. Thursday, followed by the seminar from 8 a.m. to noon.

As of Monday afternoon, fewer than 90 tickets to the event remained, according to the event website, batonrougetrends.net. Admission is $55.