Real estate market strong, despite cooling

Real estate market strong, despite cooling.
The mountains that surround the Blue Ridge Region seem to protect us from more than just Mother Nature"s wrath. Real estate markets in other areas of the commonwealth-like sprawling Northern Virginia and the Tidewater urban population centers-are experiencing severe downturns. Our regional real estate markets have been spared much of the storm. While there has been slowing in the markets, local real estate professionals say it has still been a pretty good year for their industry. 'Overall, as far as sales go in general, it has flattened out,' says Neal Wall with ReMax. 'However, with residential sales, I"m personally on par with last year"s sales.' Wall and his colleagues in the region say the market is cooling-a perfectly understandable expectation given the extremely energetic performance of real estate locally and national for the last few years.