Hopes soared on reports that the recession was coming to a close as the United States economy posted a healthy 5.9% gain and businesses invested to boost GDP. As the recession eases Boise real estate will be helped out by the positive news.

It was estimated that Gross Domestic Product would increase at a clip of 5.7%, instead it grew at a rate of 5.9% according to the Commerce Department, based on fourth quarter financial numbers. The latest numbers reflect the most rapid pace since midyear of 2003. The fastest quarter was the third quarter which posted a robust 2.2% growth rate. Rewinding time to the 2003 numbers would definitely help the Boise real estate market.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast GDP, which measures total goods and services output within U.S. borders, growing at a 5.7% rate in the October-December period. It is looking like the first quarter of 2010 will not continue in the rapid pace of recovery shown throughout 2009, which had posted the most impressive numbers since the worst financial catastrophe since the Great Depression. Even thought consumer spending and the housing markets were down, the fact that businesses increased investment in software and equipment helped add some steadiness to the economy and allowed business to liquidate bloated inventories. This wan’t just a national trend either, as the Boise real estate market saw very similar changes in volume as well.

Growth was projected to be about 2.2%, but has been revised down to about 1.9%, which shows that growth has been due to reduced inventories and not so much a return of market demand. Inventory sales amounts were alarmingly reduced from $33.5 billion to around $16.9 billion in the final quarter. From July to September alone, they slid just over $139 billion. The change in inventories alone added 3.88 percentage points to GDP in the last quarter. Such a dramatic increase has not been seen since the final quarter of 1987. With so many suppliers eliminating excess inventory, builders in the Boise real estate market were helped out.

As a whole, the year 2009 featured the most dramatic decrease in GDP, at 2.4%, since the post World War II recovery of 1946. Even consumer spending projections had to be adjusted downward from 2% in January to the actual number of 1.7% increase. In the preceding quarter, the federal government “cash for clunkers” program lifted GDP by 2.8%, which was obviously a short term fix for a sector of the economy. In the fourth quarter, consumer spending – which normally accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity — contributed 1.23 percentage points to GDP. In such a financial crisis, the Boise real estate market is not independent of the national trends.

With spending on commercial real estate heading down quickly, the fact that the growth happened at all was due mostly because of equipment purchases and investment in software necessary for business growth and improvement. With business investment being much higher than the projected 2.9%, at 6.5% actually, improvement is on the way. It had dropped 5.9% over the prior three-month period. Spending on new home construction grew at a slower 5% rate in the fourth quarter, instead of 5.7% estimated last month. With growth as high as 18.9%, the third quarter was a busy one. Both exports and imports grew much stronger than initially estimated in the fourth quarter, leaving a trade gap that contributed 0.3 percentage point to GDP growth, the data showed. In the Boise real estate industry, the GDP and other market factors are closely watched.

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