Around the U.S., home prices are at all-time highs. However, a new report says that some markets are about to fix themselves, which could give buyers some wiggle room when it comes to prices.
According to the property data company Attom, the most home markets that were most likely to go down in the second quarter of this year were in California, New Jersey, and Illinois. The largest cluster of these markets was in the New York City metropolitan area.
The amount of risk was determined by things like the difference in how much homes cost, the number of mortgages that were past due, the number of homes that might go into foreclosure, and unemployment. The business looked at almost 600 counties across the country that had enough data to study.
“Some markets show signs of possible instability, which suggests a mixed level of risk, especially in some regions that show signs of concern over and over again,” Attom CEO Rob Barber said in a statement. The company found that the areas most likely to experience a fall were mostly coastal markets, just like it had been in other times in the past few years.
There is no doubt that “these observations don’t immediately raise red flags or warning signs of an impending downturn,” Barber said.
But they do show where the risks are higher, he said. “Because the housing market is still having problems, it’s important to keep a close eye on areas where key indicators point to a higher chance of problems,” he said.
In some Sun Belt areas, home prices have already gone back down because so many more homes have been put on the market in the past few months. Many of these were boomtowns during the pandemic, as people moved there from the Northeast and West Coast’s crowded cities. Since then, that market has gone down.
Recent data from the real estate broking Redfin RDFN -1.33% shows that home prices are going down year over year in places like Austin and Fort Worth, Texas, and Tampa, Florida. At the same time, the number of homes for sale is going up.
A monthly study from the Housing Centre of the American Enterprise Institute says that Austin, Cape Coral, and North Port, Fla., saw the biggest drop in home price growth year over year in July.
Recently, the price of housing has gone through the roof. It took at least 43% of the average local wage to pay for a mortgage, property taxes, and insurance on a median-priced single-family home in 33 of the 51 U.S. counties that Attom said were most likely to experience a market downturn in the second quarter of 2024. This made homeownership “seriously unaffordable.” Realtors’ data shows that the average price of a home in July was $422,600, which is 4.2% more than the same month last year.
Tangipahoa Parish, La., which is east of Baton Rouge, had the most homeowners who were underwater (their mortgage amount was higher than their estimated property value). This made it one of the 51 counties thought to be most likely to have problems with the housing market. About a quarter of the homes there were behind on their mortgage. In the U.S., only 5.1% of mortgages are behind.
In the meantime, Charlotte County, Fla., which includes Punta Gorda, had the highest rate of foreclosures among the most at-risk areas. One in 464 homes there was at risk of going into foreclosure. In the U.S. as a whole, about one in 1,575 houses is at risk of going into foreclosure.
There are 51 at-risk towns in the New York City area. Kings County, which includes Brooklyn, Richmond County, which includes Staten Island, and Bronx County are all on the list. Attom thinks of Essex, Passaic, Sussex, and Union counties in New Jersey as suburbs of New York City. All four of these counties made the top 51 ranking.
According to Attom, these are the 10 U.S. housing areas that are most likely to go down.
County | Metropolitan area | Median sales price as of the second quarter of 2024 |
Madera, Calif. | Madera, Calif. | $ 435,000 |
San Joaquin, Calif. | Stockton-Lodi, Calif. | $ 530,000 |
Butte, Calif. | Chico, Calif. | $ 369,250 |
Henry, Ga. | Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Ga. | $ 314,300 |
Kaufman, Texas | Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas | $ 322,381 |
Humboldt, Calif. | Eureka-Arcata-Fortuna, Calif. | $ 401,500 |
Solano, Calif. | Vallejo-Fairfield, Calif. | $ 560,000 |
Passaic, N.J. | New York-Newark-Jersey City, N.Y.-N.J.-Pa. | $ 500,000 |
Merced, Calif. | Merced, Calif. | $ 400,000 |
Shasta, Calif. | Redding, Calif. | $ 338,500 |
On the flip side, the states with the fewest housing markets at risk of a downturn include Virginia, Wisconsin and Tennessee, Attom said.
The lowest rates of underwater mortgages and foreclosure cases were found in Chittenden County, Vt., where the city of Burlington is located.