March 2024 | Volume 14 | Issue 12
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REAL ESTATE SPOTLIGHT Resilience in the real estate market, tempered optimism for 2024 By LEE M. HURLEY
M
ight as well start with the bad news. Nationwide in 2023, home sales numbers were the lowest in almost 30 years. Existing home sales slid nearly 20% from the prior year (which wasn’t that great, either), according to the National Association of Realtors. Statewide, Alabama racked up just over $2 billion in total home sales in 2022, and that number dropped by a billion in 2023. That brings us to Mountain Brook, which averaged a 19% drop in sales volume last year. Clearly, interest rates are a major culprit, though other factors were in play. “There are Mountain Brook homeowners who have rates as low as the high 2 percents,” said Wilmer Poynor, president and owner of Ray & Poynor Properties, “and there are plenty more locked into the 3 and the 4 percents, so for them to relinquish that for any reason and get a mortgage rate much higher is an issue.”
See REAL ESTATE | page A18 Margi Ingram, founder of Ingram and Associates, talks about the molding during a walkthrough of a condo in English Village. Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Fire Department family legacies continue By GRACE THORNTON When Mason Parker transferred to the Mountain Brook Fire Department in November 2023, he found stacks of old photos, and he was pretty sure some of them would mean something to him. “We found them cleaning up, and I went through probably 2,000 of them trying to find pictures of my dad and ended up finding four or five of them,” he said. “I remember the jacket he was wearing; I remember the old station in the background. I looked at them and started remembering all these things from when I was a kid. It’s neat.”
Mason Parker (left), a firefighter with the Mountain Brook Fire Department, and his father, Rigg Parker, who retired from the department in 2022, stand in front of Truck 1 at Mountain Brook Fire Station No. 1. Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
His dad, Rigg Parker, was a Mountain Brook firefighter for nearly 29 years before retiring from his role as an apparatus operator in 2022. The elder Parker said he first got interested in fighting fires through the Boy Scouts’ Exploring program, which offered career experiences and mentoring to middle schoolers. “I grew up in Montevallo, and they had just started that program,” Rigg said. “I was 13, maybe.”
INSIDE
See FIREFIGHTER | page A16 Sponsors......................... A4 City................................... A6
Business.......................... A11 Community....................A15
Sports.............................. B4 Events.............................. B11
Opinion........................... B12 Summer Camp Guide.... B13 facebook.com/villageliving
Batter Up
Camp Guide
Mountain Brook High School’s baseball season is underway.
Explore summer camp options in our Summer Camp Guide.
See page B4
See page B13