Those looking to find the top housing markets that have most recently been deemed to have it all for homeowners, can turn to Johnson City, Tennessee as the top emerging housing market this fall, as found in a new report released this week by realtor.com®.
The fall 2022 Wall Street Journal/realtor.com® Emerging Housing Markets Index looked at the 300 largest metropolitan areas to determine emerging markets via their healthy local economies, vibrant local business communities, and the kind of lifestyle features that will continue to draw others in.
Key highlights:
- Johnson City, in first place, boasts a $379,000 median list price that is below the more than $425,000 of September’s national median list price. The area also has many out-of-state home shoppers (4 out of every 5 shoppers), and an average of 42 days on the market for listings.
- In second place is Visalia-Porterville, California, with a median home price of $400,000 and an unemployment rate of 7.4%, but it boasts proximity to national parks, rivers, and beaches that enable residents to get outside and enjoy nature.
- Following behind these are Elkhart-Goshen, Indiana ($257,000 median home price, 2.2% unemployment rate); North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, Florida ($548,000 median home price, 2.4% unemployment rate) and Fort Wayne, Indiana ($300,000 median home price, 2.7% unemployment rate).
- Larger markets are more popular: the average population among the top 20 is nearly 900,000 and five of the markets exceed 1 million residents. This is larger than both the roughly 400,000 average in the Summer markets and 600,000 in the Spring.
- In 6 of the top 20 markets, the number of homes for sale has more than doubled compared to this time last year, and home listings were up by an average 40%.
- Homes in 16 of the 20 markets sold faster than the national average (48 days). Specifically, midwestern markets were the fastest moving: Fort Wayne at 25 days; Topeka, Kansas at 29 days; Elkhart-Goshen at 31 days; Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, Tennessee at 31 days and Columbus, Ohio at 32 days.
- Eighteen of the 20 markets registered below the 3.6% average unemployment rate, with wages across the top markets averaging $1,120 per week.
What this means in the industry:
“Despite offices reopening, employees still have considerable flexibility on where they can work. Combine this with persistent inflation, and households have both means and motive to pursue a move to a lower-cost area–in effect creating their own personal inflation-fighting plan,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist for realtor.com® and author of the report. “These affordable emerging markets saw population grow 0.8% on average and their residents are relatively mobile, with roughly 16.7% moving in the last year compared to 15.4% among all markets reviewed. Perhaps most importantly for the local housing markets, these areas have seen an increase in home shoppers from elsewhere, with nearly 7-in-10 (69.5%) viewers checking out home listings from another market, an increase of 7.5 percentage points compared to the year prior.”
Eric Kistner, managing broker of Bridge Pointe Real Estate located in Johnson City, commented:
“Johnson City is a fantastic place to live. The people are great; every major city on the east coast is within a day’s drive, we have world-class health care, excellent schools, no income tax, and we get to witness all four seasons. Sometimes we see them all in one week. The housing market remains strong as we continue to see people moving here from out of state due in part to our low cost of living. Multiple offers are still common on new listings, our days-on-market metric is falling month over month, and inventory levels are at all-time lows. Unfortunately, like many areas in Tennessee, we don’t have enough homes to sell because many would-be sellers are sitting idle due to higher rates.”
For the full report, click here.
