According to MSNMoney, the Tri-Cities ranked thirteenth in an evaluation of 292 markets. Many areas of the country have experienced depreciation in home values. Not here! In the 3rd quarter of ’08, we saw an almost 1% increase in price appreciation – in the last year we experienced a 4.11% hike, and over the last 5 years, we enjoyed a 20.5% improvement in home values. If you bought your home before ’03, you’re loving life right about now!
We bought our home in 1998 for just over $100,000.00 If we were to sell it today, we’d probably get between $150k-$160k. That means we’re just above the curve of 4% annual appreciation.
The market here continues to move along nicely, without a crazy boom/bust cycle. As Aesop said, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
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Hi Cari – Looks like you are very fortunate in Tri-Cities with the appreciation being ‘slow and steady’ – Who are the major employers in your area?
Hi, Di – thanks for stopping by the blog! Hanford (the nuclear plant in Richland) and associated businesses provide most of the jobs in the area. We haven’t always been so lucky with the appreciation, though. For many years, the Tri-Cities suffered through market vagaries due to government funding, or lack thereof. There was a newspaper headline in 1982, I think, parodying the Seattle billboards back in the era of the Boeing bust – “Will The Last Person to Leave the Tri-Cities Turn Out the Lights?” The theory is that we have diversified enough now that when the clean-up work is eventually complete, we won’t become a ghost town, as we threatened to do all those years ago.