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Fla. home market sizzled in past year
PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. – Sept. 16, 2016 – Florida home prices rose 9.95 percent from mid-2015 to mid-2016, the fourth-best showing in the nation, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s latest home price index.
Oregon led the way with 11.68 percent appreciation, followed by Colorado and Washington. Vermont turned in the worst performance, a drop of 0.39 percent.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency uses an index, so there’s no dollar figure attached to its measure of state home prices.
25-year trend not so hot
Take the longer view and Florida’s fortunes fade. Over the past 25 years, Florida home prices have risen 159 percent, good for just 13th place among the national rankings.
The biggest gain over the past quarter-century came in Washington, D.C., where prices soared 400 percent, a trend that won’t sit well with haters of big government. Colorado ranked second, posting a 286 percent gain.
Connecticut had the worst showing. Homes there increased just 67 percent, meaning they scarcely kept pace with inflation.
Rich states, poor states
The U.S. increasingly has become a nation of housing haves and have-nots. Homeowners in such fast-appreciating areas as California, Colorado and Washington, D.C., have seen their home values soar.
But in Midwestern states such as Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, home values have lagged.
“Homebuyers who were raised in, or migrated to, a few select areas of the country in the 1980s have experienced very different rates of home value appreciation than homebuyers in the rest of the country,” writes Ralph McLaughlin, economist at real estate website Trulia.
Copyright © 2016 The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Fla.), Jeff Ostrowski. Visit The Palm Beach Post. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
