Target: Housing Market

This is a partial transcript from "Your World with Neil Cavuto," July 12, 2004, that was edited for clarity.

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: What would happen to your home’s price if terror strikes again here at home? What would happen to the real estate market both commercially and at least residentially?

Let’s ask Thomas Kunz, he is the president and CEO of Century 21 Real Estate Corporation who joins us live from Houston, Texas.

Tom good to have you.

THOMAS KUNZ, PRES. & CEO, CENTURY 21 (CD): Neil, thank you.

CAVUTO: This is always the unthinkable, Tom, and there is no way to plan for it, obviously. But we have weathered some of the past crises, not only the 2001 attacks but the 1993 attacks, before those. The real estate market held its own, maybe something about the American attitude, defiance in the face of threats. What would happen this go-round?

KUNZ: Well, I think we’ll probably see the same thing that we saw before, Neil, when 9-11 happened, we saw in the East Coast, it was more impactful than it was anywhere else for about two to three weeks, people kind of got back to normal, got back into it. And then it just started taking off. And I think most people look at their home as security. And I know I was in New Jersey at the time when it happened, and, you know, my thoughts were, I wanted to get home. But once we got home things kind of got back to normal. We kind of started to deal with what happened. And I think if anything like that happened, the community that it got hit in would be very impacted but the rest of the country would, over a period of a couple weeks, I think, get back to normal.

CAVUTO: All right. But even we noticed in the community that was impacted, Thomas, for example, Downtown New York and much of the immediate Lower Manhattan area, rebounded in surprisingly short order. What do you think that tells us.

KUNZ: Well, I think what it really tells us is that people really value homeownership. You know, what we saw is that they were traveling as much as they used to do in the past. They were staying closer to home. They started to discover things around their homes, cities and their towns and started to really kind of hunker down for a while.

And then I think as things started to move and property values started to increase, they started to look at, you know, maybe now is this time to move and get maybe a nicer home or move up. You know, most real estate is really sold because events are going on in people’s lives not just because they decide they want to move.

CAVUTO: So I imagine the same dynamics applied to the real estate industry as applied in the past, stable interest rates, supply versus demand, a lot more demand than there is available supply and you picture that remaining the case?

KUNZ: Yes, we have had a great year at Century 21 the first half of this year and we anticipate that it is going to continue on through the rest of ‘04 and, in fact, we could possibly set another record this year just as we have done the last couple years.

CAVUTO: All right. I want to thank you very much. Thomas Kunz, the Century 21 president and CEO

Content and Programming Copyright 2004 Fox News Network, L.L.C. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Transcription Copyright 2004 eMediaMillWorks, Inc. (f/k/a Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.), which takes sole responsibility for the accuracy of the transcription. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No license is granted to the user of this material except for the user's personal or internal use and, in such case, only one copy may be printed, nor shall user use any material for commercial purposes or in any fashion that may infringe upon Fox News Network, L.L.C.'s and eMediaMillWorks, Inc.'s copyrights or other proprietary rights or interests in the material. This is not a legal transcript for purposes of litigation.