WARWICK — When Toyota offered zero-percent financing on the Tundra recently, sales spiked at the Balise dealership on Post Road. Yesterday’s Federal Reserve decision to lower a key interest rate is not expected to cause a similar rush for the other vehicles on the lot.

“That’s not going to spur a big impact,” Melissa Dias, Belise’s senior business manager, said. “You really don’t see that much of a difference.”

The one-quarter of a percentage point rate cut, the third this year, was designed to encourage consumer spending and energize the nation’s sputtering economy. But local analysts expressed skepticism yesterday that the change was bold enough to counter the influence of the mortgage crisis and rising energy costs.

Real estate and automobile sales are particularly sensitive to the federal funds rate, the price banks pay to one another for overnight borrowing. Reductions in the rate alter the cost of variable-rate mortgages and car loans, potentially boosting sales.

In Rhode Island, those important industries could use the help.

As of Oct. 1, new car registration was down 3 percent compared with the first nine months of last year, according to R.L. Polk and Co., an automotive statistics company.

Real-estate agents face a far bleaker landscape. The median price of a single-family house was down 4.4 percent through October, The Warren Group reported. Sales in October fell by 18.3 percent. The month before, sales dropped 27 percent.

Dealerships welcomed yesterday’s rate cut, hoping it will help head off a recession and slightly improve sales at a traditionally slow time of year.

In addition to cutting the federal funds rate, the Fed reduced, by one-quarter of a percentage point, the so-called discount rate that it charges banks for borrowing money from its regional branches. When a bank’s borrowing costs drop, it is able to lower the interest it charges borrowers while maintaining its profit margin.

Late yesterday, Providence-based Citizens Bank lowered its prime lending rate by a quarter-point, to 7.25 percent from 7.5 percent.

“Anytime you have reduced interest rates, it certainly helps consumers,” Jack Perkins, executive vice president of the Rhode Island Auto Dealers Association, said. “So any further cuts are going to have a positive effect on car sales.”

But the decision not to make a deeper cut — some analysts had called for a half-point move — means the impact on loans will be small for many borrowers.

At the Balise dealership, for example, a car buyer who borrows $19,500 at 6 percent interest would see payments dip by only $4 a month if the interest rate drops by a half-point, Dias said. A one-point drop brings $9 in monthly savings.

“The government isn’t going to set people’s standard as to when they buy a car,” Dias said. “It just isn’t enough savings.”

But the modest savings may help salespeople prod buyers to choose a new vehicle instead of a used one, she said. Still, Thomas Pipoli, vice president of the Balise Auto Group, said that will not compensate for lost business from homeowners whose mortgage problems damaged their credit and left them unable to secure a car loan.

Real-estate analysts, meanwhile, are questioning whether the rate cut will improve sales. The depreciation of house values has limited options for home-equity loans, caused skyrocketing foreclosure rates and contributed to the broader economic slowdown.

“I wouldn’t be overly optimistic that it would result in a flurry of buying,” Michele L. Caprio, chief executive officer of the Greater Providence Board of Realtors, said. “But hopefully people who have been sitting on the sidelines will jump into the marketplace.”

Terry Egan, editor in chief of publications for The Warren Group, which tracks real-estate transactions, agreed, pointing to the combined benefits of lower prices and lower short-term interest rates. “For someone ready to make the leap, that’s two bits of good news in terms of buying opportunity,” he said.

But Patrick Newport, an economist at Global Insight, a research firm, does not project a major improvement.

“There is just an abundance of supply and prices are too high,” Newport said. “It may have a small effect but not enough to keep the market from turning in really ugly numbers over the next two quarters.”

Leonard Lardaro, an economist at the University of Rhode Island, said the tightening of credit that brought about subprime mortgage problems may undermine the goal of the rate cut. Although borrowing is now more attractive, he said, tighter lending standards have left many potential borrowers ineligible.

“This is a welcome cut, but it’s not enough,” Lardaro said yesterday. “You can’t rule out that Rhode Island might be in the early stages of a recession.”

bgedan@projo.com