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| Source: Snake River Multiple Listing Service |
A statistician I am not, but I do like looking at the housing market numbers from the Snake River Multiple Listing Service to see what is going on locally.
Today’s drill-down was to look at stats from January and February over the past 10 years. It’s typically not a great time of year for home sales, but what I found interesting was that the number of homes sold (259) was the highest since the first two months of 2007 (242). Things had been climbing back since 2012, but the 37.8 percent spike from 2015 to this year represented a development worth noticing.
If I were to guess at what might be driving this, I would point to Fluor Idaho, which is taking over the Idaho Cleanup Project at the beginning of June and has opened a new office on Lindsay Boulevard.
The other thing to note is that the median price has bounced back. In the first two months of 2007 it was $146,700 and in 2016 it was $149,000, up sharply from 2015.
This tracks pretty closely with the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s HPI Calculator, a tool I never get tired of using. A home bought for $146,000 in the last quarter of 2006 would have an estimated value of $147,161 in the last quarter of 2015. All in all, housing prices seem to be back where they were before they peaked in 2008 then tanked.
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| If you bought a home in the Idaho Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area for $146,000 at the end of 2006 this is the line chart for the estimated value through Q4 2015. (Source Federal Housing Finance Agency) |
