About Matanuska Susitna County, AK

With the increase in gas prices this last year I thought I would take a look at the sales numbers for the homes in the Knik-Goose Bay area for the year so far.  This includes the Knik-Goose Bay Road area out to and including Settlers Bay.

For Realtors and others familiar with the Mat-Su Boroughs tax maps, these include OC3, OC4, and HO16.  You can see the borough maps yourself here.

This area was one of the fastest growing in the Matanuska-Susitna Boroughs which is itself the fastest growing area in Alaska.

You can see that the sales volume, (total sales), was amazingly steady from 2004–2007.  It dropped off this year to the same volume as 2003. Prices increased steadily until 2008 with a huge jump from 2005 to 2006.

I don’t think that this years decrease in volume can be necessarily attributed to gas prices alone.  Obviously we have seen a drop in sales volume across the board.  It is also obvious that we are not seeing a real estate crash, the volume is still as good as 2003 which we thought at the time was a very healthy sales climate.

I will take a look at the core area between Wasilla and Palmer for a comparison tomorrow.  For a comparison to the whole borough you can look at the study I did at the end of September.

The Chugach Mountains over Palmer were beautiful in today’s late afternoon sun. Gerrit had been asking to get the old Skidoo Elan out for more than a week so we brought it up to Jay’s place on Lazy Mountain. Jay and his family have ten acres there which gives the kids room to zoom around without going on anyone elses land.

This is almost a 30 year old snow machine, but Gerrit loves to zip around with it. It is nice and light and rarely gets stuck. If it does, he can horse it out by himself.

His cousin Thomas had his Snow Sport going and was spinning brodies all over the snow.

The two boys kept zooming around as it got darker and darker.

Thomas finally slowed down when his hands started getting cold.

We left Gerrit out in the dark and went in to Aunt Susan’s hot chocolate. Gerrit finally got the hint and came out of the cold as well.

A great snow day…and it isn’t even November yet. It’s going to be a fantastic winter !!!

John McCain just shocked America by choosing our governor and former Wasilla mayor as his Vice Presidential running mate.

All of a sudden, people all over the world are talking about Wasilla. They are even pronouncing it correctly. No more Waseea.

Almost everyone I met today is excited about her candidacy. Most of the people in this area voted for her as governor and still support her. I think she still has an approval rating in the high 80s.

Our home phone started ringing early this morning. Reporters were calling for my wife Grace who is a delegate to the Republican National Convention. She is in New York state visiting relatives before heading for Minneapolis tomorrow for the convention.

I’m not sure how this is going to change our little community. Wasilla is already one of the fastest growing communities in the Alaska. I guess we will wait and see.

Until then…GO SARAH.