Buying a home? Consider East Meadow

The quiet Cape and split-level houses that dress central East Meadow streets cringed as many others across the county crumpled during the housing bust.
    
Theirs is as an insulated market: First-time buyers’ families rouse their living rooms; dependable owners attend to their mortgages.
    
East Meadow is an economically mid-range and working-class marketplace, said Mike Litzner, a broker at Century 21 on Hempstead Turnpike. Sub-prime markets, reflections of financially strapped spots where lending was lax, suffered the worst the last decade as owners reneged on mortgages and sellers were stifled by plunging prices.
   
“I think what helps [East Meadow] is in this economy there’s a certain amount of cops and teachers that are professionals that have those solid jobs”—provable income, capable of carrying a mortgage, Litzner said. “Those are the types of buyers that the banks love right now.”
     
Dotted lines are being signed. There are currently 126 houses on the market in East Meadow according to Litzner—definitely, he said, down from last year.
    
Litzner puts the average house price in the area at $375,000.  It’s a great opportunity for buyers, he said, because prices are down around 20 percent or 2 percent from mid-decade highs, and interest rates are low.
    
The $8,000 federal tax credit for new homeowners, which expired on April 30, was also a boon.
    
Christopher Hubbard, a Re/Max agent and lifelong East Meadow resident, said that he is trying to get several customers “to contract” before the tax credit expires.
   
Hubbard, who partners with his mother JoAnn Hubbard at their office on the outskirts of East Meadow, shows homes around central Nassau County. His buyers are a diverse group, often coming from Queens and Brooklyn, he said.