Metros Where Home Prices Shot Up This Year

The spring home-buying season is well underway, and despite the storm clouds of rising interest rates and inflation, the strong job market is providing stability for homebuyers. In certain metropolitan areas of the country, the housing market continues to be white hot, with prices marching higher. 

ATTOM Data Solutions, a real estate data analytics company, provided 24/7 Wall St. with housing price data from 2021 and 2022. The data includes metro areas with at least 1,000 single-family home and condo sales in 2021. To find the 50 metros where home prices shot up this year, 24/7 Wall St. ranked metros by the change in home price in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. Home prices in the 50 metros rose over 18% annually.

The national median home price increased 1.7% to $320,500 in the first quarter of this year, from $315,000 in the fourth quarter of 2021. That was the ninth straight quarterly record and was up 16.5% from the first quarter of 2021.  

Profit margins appear to be slowing as rising interest rates are starting to be felt. Profit margins on median-priced single-family home sales across the U.S. dipped to 47.2% in the first quarter from 51.6% in the fourth quarter of 2021. That was the first quarter of decline in profit growth since late 2019 and the largest in a decade. (These are the largest changes in home values for the 50 biggest metros 2000 to 2022.)

The average mortgage rate has increased to 5.3%, according to Freddie Mac, causing monthly mortgage payments to increase by about one-third compared with a year ago. (These are states where the most people own their homes.)

The economic uncertainty has slowed but not stopped home prices from increasing in much of the country, but there are still favorable areas where demand is putting greater upward pressure on prices. Only one metro area outside of the West and the South earned a place on the list. The states with the most metro areas on the list are Florida and Colorado. 

Twelve of the 50 metros where home prices shot up are in the Sunshine State – six of them in the top 10. The biggest increases in median home prices in Florida during the first quarter compared to the previous quarter were in Port St. Lucie (7.7%), Lakeland (7.6%), and Cape Coral-Fort Myers (7.5%). Compared to the first quarter in 2021, home prices in these three cities shot up over 29%.

Outside of Florida, Colorado has the most metros on the list with five. They are the Frontier Range towns of Aurora, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, and Greeley. Arizona and North Carolina each have four metropolitan areas on the list.

Click here to see the metros where home prices shot up this year

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