Markets with Worst Appreciation

[Nick Gerli]

Everyone loves to talk about the markets that seeing crazy appreciation - the Boise's and Spokane's of the world - but what about the markets that are lagging the rest? 

The data below highlights 15 large markets with the worst appreciation over the last year. Data is sourced from Zillow and covers the "metro area" for each market. 

Quite an interesting array of markets on this worst performers list. Highlights:

-How about Texas? Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio dominating the bottom of the list. This comes as Texas just posted by far the highest levels of population growth of any state through mid-2020. Could oversupply be an issue?

-Chicago has been a market that has lagged the rest of the US in almost every relevant metric over the last 10 years: income growth, population growth, home price growth, etc. 

-Over half of this list is comprised of state capitals. Raleigh, Richmond, Harrisburg, Baton Rouge, Columbia, Jackson, Oklahoma City, and Des Moines. Could be coincidence...or maybe not?

-Low appreciation might not be the worst thing in the world. It could mean values in these markets are more stable through a downturn. Some of the cities are the ones that performed the best during the real estate crash from 2007-12. 

What are your thoughts? Are you invested or looking to invest in any of these markets? 

[Kyle McCorkel]

@Nick Gerli

Thanks for sharing, this is interesting indeed.

A few points/questions:

To clarify, is this the bottom 15 (sorted by appreciation) out of the top 100 largest metros by population? If so, important to note this leaves out a lot of smaller metro areas.

Also, as you mentioned, low appreciation is not completely bad. For instance, *relative* appreciation should be considered. For example, my local market (Harrisburg*) is on that list of the bottom 15 but our historical rate of appreciation is more like 2%. So a 5% appreciation for us is CRAZINESS ;)

By the way, Harrisburg is the worst place in the world to invest and you should all stay away. Nothing to see here ;) After all, it’s in the bottom 15 of this list!