Is Your Metro Fully Recovered? Five Added to List

Since the housing crash and recession of 2008, some metro areas have fully recovered while others are still lagging behind the housing recovery. With help from the Federal Housing and Finance Agency’s Home Price Index, HSH.com put together a quarterly report on the top and bottom 10 metros that have recovered the most and the least respectively.

Though the metros in the top 10 have not changed since last quarter, all of them moved further above “boom time” peaks for home prices, which tightens their hold on their prospective positions. The bottom 10 markets also have not changed, but two notable moves in the category were that of the Las Vegas metro area, which relinquished its position as the metro with the greatest gap between peak time and now yet to recover to Bakersfield, California. Though prices continue to improve steadily over the U.S., Camden, New Jersey’s distance to its former high point 10 years ago, has grown this quarter, moving it further down the list.

Five metro areas joined the “fully recovered” group, including Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, Minnesota-Wisconsin; Montgomery-Bucks-Chester counties, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; San Diego-Carlsbad, California; and Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Michigan. Returning again after recovering and then falling back in the first quarter of 2016, the Akron, Ohio metro area is back in the group where home prices are achieving new highs.

The “nearly recovered” group, likely to be next in line to hit “fully recovered” in the next quarter or so, includes the Tacoma-Lakewood, Washington and Cleveland-Elyria, Ohio metro areas. Though the El Paso, Texas and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, California areas were close, they need to see prices rise by more than two percentage points to be included in the “nearly recovered” group.

Even though many markets have yet to come close to their boom-year price peaks, according to HSH.com, they have seen significant price recoveries since hitting their bottom values. They predict that home prices in areas like Las Vegas may have been inflated to such a degree that their “normal” value may still be well below their previous price peak.