‘More space’ for big-city emigrants: Boise ranks No. 1 in new housing-market ranking
Everyone knows that Boise’s housing market has emerged from the pandemic as hot as ever: perfectly cooked if you’re a seller, a third-degree-burn risk if you’re a buyer, especially on an Idaho worker’s paycheck.
Now comes Zillow, the national real estate sales site, declaring the Boise area No. 1 among midsize U.S. markets poised for more growth. Its report could attract even more outside buyers to join the bidding wars for the few available houses.
Zillow said it included only the 75th- to 125th-largest metropolitan statistical areas in this ranking (Boise is 78th), but the company said these markets in general are hotter now than those, say, in ever-popular West Coast cities.
“Mid-sized cities like Boise, Syracuse (New York) and Portland (Maine) are now leading the country as the top markets poised for growth, replacing expensive coastal metros such as San Francisco and Seattle that had led the way in the past,” Zillow said in a research post.
“Many of these markets also happen to offer home shoppers more space for their money, as the coronavirus pandemic has reshaped where and how people want to live.”
For struggling locals, the report may recall a different report put out in January by the National Association of Realtors. That one said the divergence between prices and incomes in the Boise area from 2014 through the third quarter of 2019 created the largest drop in affordability among the nation’s top 174 metro areas.
The increase in home prices was quadruple the 18% growth rate in median family income, by the association’s estimate.
Since that report, local real estate agents have told story after story of houses selling fast, sometimes sight unseen, except for a brief downturn when the pandemic crimped business activity early in the spring.
Ann Edmark-Reed, a Boise real estate agent, told the Statesman in August of a young couple fighting to buy a house. “We’ve offered on three or four homes, they have 10% down, they write nice letters to the sellers saying how bad they want their house — and nothing,” she said.
The first weekend of September, a line formed outside a home newly listed for $540,000 in the Alpine Pointe subdivision near Eagle and McMillan roads in Meridian.
“It was by appointment only, and they had people lined up in the streets and in their cars all day,” neighbor Laura Trairatnobhas, also a real estate agent, told the Statesman last week. “I was told by a neighbor that the house went under contract with four full-cash offers the same day.”
Realities like that didn’t stop Zillow from doing what others have done as they include Boise in national rankings: touting the city as affordable. The median price of an Ada County house just topped $400,000, and the lowest median anywhere in Ada and Canyon counties is $276,000, in Southwest Caldwell.
The Boise area is indeed affordable compared with America’s highest-cost urban areas. Zillow’s median price in Seattle is $768,000, in San Francisco $1.4 million.
“These mid-sized metros offer more bang for the buck than many big cities, as people rethink how — and where — they want to live in the new COVID-era normal,” Zillow’s research staff wrote. “As remote work opens up more opportunities for home ownership, many first-time buyers may seek out a starter home in a more affordable area.”
Zillow pegs the Boise metropolitan area’s “typical home value” at $334,965. The metropolitan statistical area includes less costly Boise, Gem and Owyhee counties, as well as price-leading Ada and No. 2 Canyon.
Home values have climbed 11.8% in the past year and are forecast to grow 5.6% in the next year, Zillow said. More than one in four homes sells for higher than the listing price.
“Buyers are snatching up houses in record time here, with the typical home going under contract in as little as five days,” the researchers wrote.
