| Tri-Cities housing prices outpace national trend |
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• Kingsport-Bristol, Johnson City prices outpace national trend. By JEFF KEELING Press Business Editor Home prices in the Kingsport-Bristol metropolitan area rose at an annual rate of 4.75 percent in the year ended June 30, the 14th-highest percentage out of 291 areas nationwide, while Johnson City’s metro wasn’t far behind with a 2.86 percent gain. (Johnson City, which includes Washington, Carter and Unicoi counties, is not ranked in the 291 metros but figures are provided, and the gain would have put it 58th.) The figures, released Tuesday by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, showed a nationwide annual decline in value of 4.8 percent. This contrasted with the more highly publicized “Case-Shiller Index” (also released Tuesday) which measures sales figures in just 20 large metro areas and which showed a 15.4 percent year-overyear drop. The OFHEO numbers come from sales of existing homes and refinances. The 4.7 percent annual drop was the steepest since the index began in 1995. The National Association of Realtors figures for the same period show a 7.1 percent drop. Local housing industry officials and political leaders welcomed Tuesday’s news, and also bemoaned the fact the relative strength of the Tri-Cities market tends to be overwhelmed by negative publicity about national trends. “A lot of folks from harder-hit areas can’t sell their houses and move here, so that’s slowed the pace of sales, but our property values, I know it from my own neighborhood and loans I’ve done, houses are still holding their appreciation levels pretty well” local mortgage broker Steve Reed said Tuesday. “I think we’ll continue to fare well, even in the face of stricter lending requirements. Just the last 120 days in the mortgage industry, it’s gotten even tougher to get loans through the system, though we’re managing to do it — and that’s because a lot of these other declining markets have got investors spooked.” Johnson City Manager Pete Peterson was equally sanguine about the local market’s relative strength. “The sky is not falling with real estate values and real estate starts,” Peterson said. “We don’t take the wild fluctuations, both positively and negatively, that the national economy does. “We kind of sit in the middle and have small variations while the rest of the country takes these huge swings up and down.” That hasn’t prevented Peterson from hearing local residents refer to the worst of the national situation and worry that things are similar here. “We all see people who overreact to national trends that they read about and don’t take the time to factor in that there is a regional effect on all these economic trends.” Peterson said he wasn’t surprised to see the northern end of the Tri-Cities performing even better than Johnson City. “That metro probably had more room to grow than what we did, because we were already building the very expensive houses and a lot of them, so there wasn’t that capacity for appreciation that there probably was in Sullivan County,” Peterson said. As for Tuesday’s news, Peterson welcomed it, even though it didn’t surprise him. “We’re very fortunate that we’re realizing appreciation when there are lots of local governments across the country facing depreciation.” Several other locations in the so-called “Mountain South” placed high on the OFHEO list. Greenville, S.C., was fourth with 5.78 percent appreciation, while Asheville, N.C., was 31st (3.84 percent), Hickory-Lenior-Morganton, N.C., was 34th (3.24 percent) and Roanoke, Va., was 67th (2.52 percent). |
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