Realtor: Camden real estate values soar

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 03/27/06

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAMDEN — Last Sunday, real estate agent Dee Sica listed a home in downtown Camden for $149,900. By Wednesday morning, it had an “under contract” sign slapped on it.

While such a quick sale and such a high price are still unusual in this city, which is among the poorest and most crime-ridden in the nation, real estate values here have increased dramatically in the last few years.

The median sales price for homes in Camden increased by 81 percent between 2003 and last year, according to a new Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors analysis of five central and southern New Jersey counties. Only one community of any size in the study — Gloucester County’s fast-suburbanizing Elk Township — saw a bigger increase.

In Camden, the median price is still low, just $63,350 last year — about one-third of the $183,000 median for all of Camden County.

Steve Storti, a senior vice president at Prudential Fox & Roach, said the rising sales prices in Camden partly reflect a hot home market in Center City Philadelphia and the New Jersey suburbs.

The rising housing prices in Camden also suggest that intense public and private efforts to revitalize the city are starting to take root.

In 2002, the state launched a plan to put $175 million into various projects in the city, with much of the cash infusion going to expand its hospitals and universities.

Homes in neighborhoods near those institutions are typically priciest.

Frank Fulbrook, a community activist who lives in the Cooper Grant neighborhood between Rutgers University’s campus in the city and the five-year-old minor-league baseball park on the redeveloped banks of the Delaware River, said his small neighborhood has only two of its 90 homes vacant. He said the last half-dozen three-story row homes to sell in the area went for more than $200,000.

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