Comparing Regional Real Estate Markets

The combined value of all the homes in the U.S. is estimated at about $20-25 trillion. Yes, that’s trillion with a “T.” That’s larger than the combined wealth in virtually all of the publicly traded companies in the US Stock market. And just as an investor would want to know how large petroleum companies performed over the past year, an owner or buyer or investor might wonder how condos performed in Southwest Florida. Because there are thousands of towns and cities throughout the country, it can be tough to compare each market.

To help make sense of the markets, we’ve just released our Quarterly Home Value Reports for the second quarter in 66 markets throughout the U.S. With hundreds of rows and columns packed into each spreadsheet, it’s tough to really make comparisons across the data without using some advanced excel skills. One question I was asked was “What is the value of an average home in a city and how has this value changed in the last year?” To answer that I’ve created a Web page (screenshot above) that has our 66 metro areas, the Zindex (median Zestimate value) for the average home, and the change in value for that area. Read on for some background as well as observations.

First, we’ve ordered the markets by population with the New York metro area leading the pack. As you start on the left, you see Zindex values around $100,000 and as you move right you get to cities valued near $1,000,000. Don’t forget, this is the Zindex of an average home (defined for this purpose as a 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 1500 square feet). The green bar for each metro area represents the average home Zindex for the whole metro area. The color of the other bars indicate the year over year Zindex performance of that city. Red means the market is hot and home values are still moving up, blue means the market is cool and falling over the last 12 months. Finally mouse over the bars to get the number details or click the bar to check out the Zillow city page. Some quick facts gleaned from the page:

• The biggest metro areas (New York and LA) have huge ranges of values with the deals being found in the far suburbs
• The most expensive cities in the Cleveland area are about half the value of the least expensive in San Francisco
• Seattle and Portland are still performing pretty well
• Miami is a bit of a mixed market with some places still going up while others are going down
• The lower priced cities around Tampa and Phoenix are down more than the higher priced homes

Take a dive into the data yourself. I think you’ll find some interesting trends. As I mentioned earlier, we release these Home Value Reports each quarter, so if there’s a particular market segment you’d like to see in the next report, let us know, and we’ll see what we can do.