Buying a home can be a great investment, as investors gobbling up properties over the last few years–when prices and mortgage rates were at the bottom–well know. Now, with homes prices and rates ticking steadily back up, investors are backing away from the market, leaving more room for the rest of us.
Perhaps you fear you’ve missed the best time for buying housing. Prices were low last year, but there are still deals to be had. The good news is that less competition for housing and an overall less-crazed market than in 2013, as I wrote about in Housing Outlook 2014: 10 Predictions From The Experts, can make for fairly decent timing for smaller-time investors. The key is to buy where the prices are still low, in cities with a lot of growth potential.
Housing Outlook 2014: 10 Predictions From The Experts
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Whether you’re looking to get into a first home that you’ll live in for a few years, or simply buy a fixer-upper that you can rent out right away, there are still plenty of cities where your money is a fairly safe bet. We teamed up with Local Market Monitor, which tracks home prices and local economic factors in more than 300 housing markets, to put together a list of the Best Buy Cities–the top 20 housing markets to invest in for 2014. To come up with this list, Local Market Monitor pulled data for the largest 100 metropolitan statistical areas (a geographical designation used by the U.S. Census) with populations of at least 575,000. From there, the choices were ranked primarily on four factors: population, home prices, and the local jobs economy. Each of our Best Buy Cities have high population and job growth, relatively low home prices, and are still considered under-valued (although in every case except Virginia Beach-Norfolk, Va., home prices have gone up). This makes them fairly low-risk investment opportunities for buyers who are smart and know not to overpay.
The key to coming up with this list is a proprietary measure that Local Market Monitor dubs the “Equilibrium Home Price.” Basically, it tracks what the average price for a market should be, if speculation, weird distortions in local income, and other factors (like the housing collapse) weren’t present in the market. The measure presumes that prices will eventually return to this level. When homes are far under the equilibrium price, investors are getting a good buy and can expect to make a good return. The other important consideration for investors is, of course, a healthy local economy. After all, there is zero point in purchasing a home in a market where the population is fleeing. That’s why Best Buy Cities are places where opportunities are growing.
“We are at a stage in the economic cycle where job growth–and demand for housing–is accelerating in some markets,” says Ingo Winzer, founder of Local Market Monitor. “The types of jobs created are often lower-paying, most suitable for renters, younger people who are willing to move from somewhere else and who don’t want to own a house right now but might have a young family and would like to rent one.”
Fort Worth-Arlington, Tex., and Dallas-Plano-Irving, Tex., top the list of our Best Buy Cities, at No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. Both cities offer homes that would be within reach for middle-class Americans, at $168,383 in Fort Worth-Arlington and $180,645 in greater Dallas. Prices in greater Fort Worth are considered 20% below their actual value, according to Local Market Monitor. Homes in the greater Dallas region are 12% down, so less off, but they are expected to rise more–29%–over the next three years.
For buyers who intend to rent out their homes, the populations in these cities are growing at a healthy clip: from 2009 to 2012, at 4.9% in Fort Worth and 6.1% in Dallas. At that rate, Dallas is tied for the fastest-growing city on the Best Buy Cities list. It’s ranked fifth in terms of job growth, at 3% as of the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics stats. Driving the demand are companies like Dallas’s One Technologies, LP, an online credit monitoring marketing service that was ranked the fastest-growing private company in the area by the Dallas Business Journal.
“The total eventual returns may be higher in markets that are still under-priced right now–that’s why those are higher in the rankings–but the rental returns should be good in all of them,” Winzer says. “I particularly like the investment markets in Texas and Oklahoma, with their low unemployment rates and ability to profit for years from new shale oil and gas development.”
The Iron Eagle Realty Team's mission is to assist you, our client, in the sale and acquisition of real estate properties in the state of Idaho, specifically the Boise Idaho Real Estate Market. Whether you are buying or selling a home, whether it is a foreclosure, short sale or equity property, we handle our customers and clients with empathy and honest truths so they can make informed decisions as they advance in the process of buying and selling real estate that meet specific needs.
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Regards, Michael Hon, REALTOR®CEO, The Iron Eagle Realty Team
Associate Broker, Silvercreek Realty Group
Certified Short Sale Specialist®
Investment Property Consultant
Direct: 208.919.0458 Office: 208.939.9033 Fax: 208.514.1422
www.IronEagleRE.com Michael.Hon@IronEagleRE.com
Click Here to Search 24/7 for The Best Real Estate Deals in Boise!Click Here to Download Our Free "Selling Your Home" Pre-Listing Plan! Click Here to Pre-Qualify for a Loan Online!
Regards, Michael Hon, REALTOR®CEO, The Iron Eagle Realty Team
Associate Broker, Silvercreek Realty Group
Certified Short Sale Specialist®
Investment Property Consultant
Direct: 208.919.0458 Office: 208.939.9033 Fax: 208.514.1422
www.IronEagleRE.com Michael.Hon@IronEagleRE.com
