For owners, agents, buyers and everyone else in Greater Boston wondering when the area’s home values are finally going to hit rock bottom, Zillow has got some good news for us.
We’ve already reached it.
The Seattle-based real estate tracking company issued its first quarter real estate market report today, and the Boston metro area is in the black.
While some value declines are likely in certain parts of the Boston area, the region as a whole hit bottom sometime in the first three months of this year. Zillow predicts that home values in the Boston metro market will rise by 0.3 percent over the next year.
No great shakes, but we’ll take it. Especially after nearly six years of a downward slide, one that was only briefly interrupted by the temporary stimulus of a soon-to-expire federal tax credit.
Zillow says 19 out of 30 metro areas will hit bottom at some point this year, including those that have already landed there. The company doesn’t see overall U.S. home values reaching a bottom until late 2012, at the earliest. Some of the metro areas that will see the biggest value gains over the next year are some of the same ones that got positively crushed during the real estate downturn, such as the Phoenix, Miami and Tampa markets. Of course, the average home in the Phoenix metro area is somewhere around $128,000 (compared to $300,000-plus here in the Boston area), so some of these hard-hit places have nowhere to go but up. In contrast, the pain is going to continue in markets such as Chicago and Atlanta, where Zillow sees values declining by more than 3 percent over the next year.
I’m also hearing anecdotal evidence from folks in the real estate industry (admittedly, a biased source) who say prices as a general rule have bottomed out (the actual health of a real estate market varies greatly here not just from town to town, but oftentimes from neighborhood to neighborhood).
Carol Bulman, CEO of the Jack Conway Co. real estate brokerage in Norwell, tells me that nearly one-third of the deals these days are all-cash deals – a sign that investors are piling back into the market. She also says that her agents confront surprisingly large crowds at many open houses – including one event in Braintree that actually drew 223 people a few weeks ago. Things got so hectic, the agent had to call in for reinforcements. It’s a welcome problem that the local real estate industry has been waiting to have for a long time.
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