Energy prices can have a major impact on our lives. For many of us our greatest awareness of today’s price of
energy comes when we’re filling up our tank at the gas 
station, or even when we’re just driving by the gas station, and we see the current price of gas. In addition, depending on where we’re living, we may become even more aware every time we get our monthly bill for heating and air conditioning, too. Then on an even larger scale, rising and falling energy prices will impact the cost of manufacturing, the cost of shipping, and they’ll impact whether or not some companies will even be able to
remain in business.
When you think about it, energy is involved in the production and distribution of every single item that we own, both in our personal lives, and in our business lives, too. The desk that you may be sitting at, all of the items on it, your furniture, your car, your computer, and your mobile devices all required energy both to be manufactured, and to be transported and relocated to exactly where you’re sitting. So with this in mind, the price of energy has a tremendous impact on what we end up paying for everything we own. In addition, the amount of energy involved in the growing, cultivating, harvesting, packaging, and shipping of food is tremendous also, so it’s no surprise that whenever we see rising energy prices, we usually see rising food prices, too.
The great news for most of us is that the fall in oil prices that we’ve experienced since July of 2014 has enabled us to be spending less money. Filling up at the pump has been so much lighter on our pocketbooks since then, and these lower energy prices have really helped to hold down the price of many of the products that we’ve been buying.
But recently we’ve seen an uptick in oil prices once again. Until now this hasn’t been enough to get most of us upset or concerned, but it’s still been raising some eyebrows. This is because none of us as consumers want to see those high oil prices returning once again.
This recent uptick in oil prices brings some conflicting news about retail sales along with it, too. We’ve been hearing that retail sales have been on the rise recently, but retail sales include these higher prices that people have been paying now for gasoline, and the higher prices that people have now been paying for food…and this definitely isn’t something that makes consumers happy. So while on the one hand retail sales statistics can seem encouraging, they don’t necessarily reflect a better life for the average person on the street.
But at the same time, from a real estate perspective, these low energy prices can represent a tremendous investment opportunity in areas where both jobs and the local economy depend heavily on how the oil industry is doing. The price of oil may be down now, but the chances of it rising once again to its previous levels before July of 2014 are probably very good. So for those people who understand this and both recognize and understand the timing of this entire cycle, they can do very well by investing in times like these in the right places.