San Diego is a key real estate investment destination in the United States. It has an excellent strategic location right on the west coast, making it one of the most urbanised cities of the United States. There are lots of tourist activities take place here apart from military related activities, tourism forms as the primary industry of this city.

Over the past decade, the real estate industry of San Diego has been hit hard by a crunching real estate crisis that has resulted in colossal rises in property value per annum. This situation has been a blow to the San Diego investment property sector primarily as a result of heavy investments made in this sector during 1996 and 2000 in hope of getting quick profit from real estate investment which resulted in the huge price hikes of property. This resulted in San Diego being one of the most expensive cities to live in all over the world and a lot of migration out of San Diego started to take place and people moved out to less cheaper parts of California. Even now, San Diego is experiencing a net negative migration which means that more people are going out of the city, leaving it as compared to new people coming over to San Diego to make it a permanent residence for them to live in to. To mar this situation further, there is a hefty amount of people who work in San Diego but commute from outside the city, coming from localities near the city or suburbs.

During the last couple of years, the prices for commercial as well as residential property have spiked twofold each year but there is some optimism for 2009 and real estate industry gurus are confident that this year’s scenario will be different than the last two. This is also evident from the recent stats collected for 2009 which show a slight fall in the negative net migration trend being observed for the past 5 years. It seems that things are looking good for San Diego property industry and there is a lot of optimism about a bearish trend to persist in the near future. But I have to say that there is a lot of work to be done as the number of foreclosures is still more than the net number of houses sold this year in the residential sector.

This may surprise some but despite this current crisis that has been plaguing the property investment industry of san Diego, the city remains a very lucrative opportunity especially for long term investors and investors that want to live here when they retire, this is due to the fact that because of the extremely high price spikes that san Diego encounters on an ongoing basis, people want to buy property over here before it gets out of their reach. People love to live in this city, the location is exotic, west coast city which is land locked forests and the Pacific and having an excellent weather, some say that San Diego’s weather is the best in the United States. This type of strategic location results in making san Diego a top tourist location and people visit san Diego from all parts of the united states as well as from all over the world, this kind of tourist influx makes real estate industry a thriving business and people invest in buying houses to rent out for the tourist season.

The currently the real estate industry in San Diego may not be thriving, but San Diego property investment has an extremely bright future, long term property investment strategy would work out very well in this city.