Home prices show sharp gains in Idaho Falls metropolitan area

The line chart from the HPI Calculator for a $100,000 house in Idaho Falls
bought in Q4 2013. (Note: Your mileage may vary.)

I was told by an associate and a newcomer to town that the housing market in Idaho Falls is off the charts, so I thought it might be time to run some numbers with our old standby, the HPI Calculator from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

This is a page where you can plug in numbers and find out how what home values in your community have done. For starters, I wanted to see what a home purchased for $100,000 in the fourth quarter of 2003 would have done in 15 years. The disclaimer on the page states that the numbers it crunches are based on the average appreciation rate of all homes in the area. “The actual value of any house will depend on the local real estate market, house condition and age, home improvements made and needed, and many other factors,” it says.

What the graph shows is that over 15 years that house would now sell for $173,443. An annual appreciation of 4.9 percent. Not bad, eh? The line graph shows a leveling off in the $116K to $120K range between 2011 and 2014, but incredible acceleration from the first quarter of 2015.

If you’d bought a $100,000 house in the fourth quarter of 2008, you’d see a lot less appreciation, 25.8 percent or nearly 2.6 percent a year. You would have been underwater from Q2 2009 to Q3 2016. Ouch!

Lastly, let’s look at what $100k would do over five years: Q4 2013 to Q3 2018. You’d be looking at a gain of $46,052, or an annual rate of appreciation of 9.2 percent.