Corridor moving companies seeing increase in summer business

The increase in moving vans zipping in and out of Linn County neighborhoods could be a sign of a housing market on the upswing.

Karl Butterbaugh, a sales executive at North American Van Lines, a national moving company that services Cedar Rapids, said the company has booked more moves through June 1 of this year than the company had through August 1 of last year.

While Butterbaugh said the influx in business is typically seasonal - with more people moving between May to the end of summer - this year has brought an onslaught of additional calls.

'Basically, the market is rebounding, and that is sparking a lot of it,” said Michael Schoon, a sales manager at Blue Lines, a full-service moving company located in Cedar Rapids. 'It creates movement and a lot of companies have held back for so long,”

This is also a trend at least one local Realtor has noticed.

'People see all the good things downtown and people feel better,” said Renae Forsyth-Christy, the president of the Cedar Rapids Area Association of Realtors and a Realtor at Skogman Realty. 'After the flood, people were cautiously optimistic and now they see that things are coming back.”

According to the National Association of Realtors, home sales increased 11 percent from the first quarter of this year compared with the first quarter of last year.

Locally, units sold in the metro area from January to May are down four percent from the same period of 2013, but homes are selling about eight days faster, according to the Cedar Rapids Area Association of Realtors. Real estate agents are attributing the slight dip to the harsh winter.

In June, there were 1,010 properties sold after an average of 90 days on the market. And mores homes sold means more business for moving companies.

'When the bubble burst on real estate, our volume dropped considerably,” Schoon said. 'People were waiting for the economy to come back. But now people are starting to feel good about things again. We're not quite where we were eight or nine years ago, but it's definitely rebounding in that direction.”

And these companies said the housing market could also be recovering regionally, something Forsyth-Christy said she has witnessed as well.

'I think the market is really strong,” she said. 'It's the same story that I'm hearing from other agents, the very same story.”