Fracking’s Effect on Second Home Sales

  |  October 1, 2012
From Wikipedia

We can’t really know the effect of fracking on the upstate New York real estate market because it hasn’t happened yet, but last Friday’s NY Times portrayed brokers with hard-to-sell properties, certain that the looming prospect of fracking was the cause.

“Coveted for its pristine water, pastoral landscapes and relative proximity to New York City, the Catskills region has long been second-home territory for urbanites,” they write. “But brokers say many listings are languishing — and not just because of the lag in the nation’s economic recovery. The prospect that New York State will open the region to hydraulic fracturing, a controversial gas drilling process known informally as fracking, has spooked potential buyers.”

Even if you don’t live directly above the Marcellus Shale, buyers and brokers say, it could affect you if many of your neighbors sell rights to their land. If anti-frackers’ fears are correct, and it does poison the water, it wouldn’t matter whether you sold your rights or not; you’d still have to pay the price.

What do you guys think? Will it ruin property values? Poison the water? Or create badly needed jobs in a painfully depressed area? Does the prospect of future fracking make you shy away from buying a home in upstate New York?

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