Indianapolis Bouncing Back - Additional Proof

As a follow up to the post I made a few days back about the Indianapolis housing market, CNN Money and Yahoo published an article that ranks Indianapolis as the 2nd market in the Nation that is ready for a market rebound.  The article reitterates what I said the other night, time to buy low and sell high.  Don’t wait until next year to get in on this market…do it now!!!  This is a wave that every other locale can only dream of.

Ten Cities Ready To Bounce Back
By Paul Kaihla, CNNMoney.com
 

The horror show of America’s residential real estate market just keeps getting scarier, what with the sub-prime mortgage crisis threatening to slash demand for homes while the inventory of unsold properties continues to pile up. It’s enough to send any prudent investor fleeing to the relative sanity of, say, the stock market.

Don’t. Instead, get ready for the bounce-back. The oldest rule of investing dictates that you buy low and sell high. Real-estate buyers aren’t at the gate, however, because most local markets have yet to hit bottom. In fact, most cities won’t do so for another year.

But Business 2.0, working with Moody’s Economy.com, has unearthed 10 major metropolitan areas that are bucking the national housing trend. By the beginning of next year, these markets should be coming back to life — and in our exclusive rankings, we’ve projected the house-price appreciation these cities will enjoy during 2008 and 2009. The gains may seem modest — they range from about 4 to 7 percent — but remember, in the midst of the current housing meltdown, any gain at all constitutes a minor miracle.

What our 10 cities have in common is that they’re relatively affordable. They missed out on the housing bubble, yet they still enjoy steady employment and income growth. Not surprisingly, five of the 10 are state capitals with hefty public payrolls. Even more telling, with the exception of the three Texas metros ( Austin, Dallas, and Houston), the big national builders didn’t make significant incursions into these markets.

“These cities didn’t draw in speculators or investment the way the coastal markets did,. says Celia Chen, the Economy.com economist who crunched our numbers.” “House prices in these places weren’t untethered from the underlying fundamentals.” These underappreciated — but soon-to appreciate — housing markets offer real opportunities to the savvy investor.

Indianapolis

Projected median sales prices for single-family homes:
Q1 2008: $122,940
Q4 2009: $130,630
Growth rate: 6.3 percent

Indianapolis is riding a few trends that are bringing about an early recovery in its real estate market. While Indiana’s capital city did join in the housing boom this decade, prices didn’t reach the stratosphere. Indianapolis still suffered through the downturn, though: Building permits for new homes dropped 30 percent from their peak in 2005. But the housing market hit bottom earlier here than in most parts of the country — during the last quarter of 2006. Now, with the local economy poised to grow faster than the national average over the next two years, house prices are projected to post a respectable gain.

Indianapolis’s low unemployment rate has made it a destination for people fleeing cities like Fort Wayne, Gary, and Terre Haute. It’s also relatively cushioned from slowdowns in the national economy because more than a third of its workforce is employed in stable sectors like professional and business services, health care, education, and government. Those white-collar corps also helps boost Indianapolis’s median household income to $50,500 a year. Given that you can buy a four-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home for less than $200,000, this makes the place the nation’s most affordable major metro.

Posted by Clayton October 2007

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