While popular measures of the housing landscape show that the market has recovered, a new study revealed that only one in three homes in the US have returned to their pre-recession peak, reported Bloomberg.
This comes even as home values at job centres Nashville or Dallas and tech hubs in the Bay Area or Denver exploded past earlier highs. A study by Trulia showed that there are more losers than winners, especially in Las Vegas, Fresno or Tucson.
In fact, fewer than 10 percent of homes across 28 metros in the US have recovered their value since the housing market went bust.
Las Vegas saw less than one percent of its homes surpass their value prior to recession as median home prices there stood at US$91,000 below its peak.
“It’s a reflection of just how well a metro area has recovered, broadly speaking,” said Trulia chief economist Ralph McLaughlin, noting that his findings mainly correlate with other measures of metro-level growth, like total population and gains in income.
McLaughlin said the high percentage of homes that have yet to recover makes any talk of a housing bubble premature. The slow recovery may have also plagued the local housing markets as evidenced by the fewer home sales in March compared to any point since 2012, he added.
“If people are aware of what their house was worth 10 or 12 years ago, and the house is worth less now, they may be holding back… They may be waiting, like you might with a stock, for it to get to a certain price—and then they will unload.”
This article was edited by Denise Djong.
