Home Prices Rise Annually Across Most Opportunity-Zone Redevelopment Areas

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ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation’s premier property database and first property data provider of Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), has released its second special report analyzing qualified Opportunity Zones established by Congress in the Tax Cuts and Jobs act of 2017 (see full methodology below). In this report, ATTOM looked at nearly 3,700 zones with sufficient sales data to analyze, which included home sales prices with at least five home sales in each quarter from 2005 through the third quarter of 2019.

The report found that about half the zones saw median home prices rise more than the national increase of 8.3 percent from the third quarter of 2018 to the third quarter of 2019.

The report also shows that 79 percent of the zones had median home prices in the third quarter of 2019 that were less than the national median of $270,000 – almost the same percentage as in the second quarter of 2019. Some 46 percent of the zones had median prices of less than $150,000, also roughly the same as in the prior quarter.

“The nationwide home-price surge in the third quarter spread through so-called Opportunity Zones, much as it did the rest of the country,” said Todd Teta, chief product officer with ATTOM Data Solutions. “Despite sitting in some of the nation’s poorest areas, Opportunity Zones were hardly immune from a housing boom heading into its ninth year. That’s encouraging news for people living in those communities as well as investors looking to take advantage of the Opportunity Zones program.”

High-level findings from the report include:

• Among the 3,658 Opportunity Zones with sufficient data to analyze, median prices rose in 48 percent of the zoned areas by more than the national rate of gain from the third quarter of 2018 to the third quarter of 2019. The national year-over-year increase was 8.3 percent.
• Among the 3,658 Opportunity Zones with sufficient data to analyze, California had the most Opportunity Zones, with 477, followed by Florida (332), Texas (293), Pennsylvania (176) and North Carolina (170).
• Of the tracts analyzed, 46 percent had a median price in the third quarter of 2019 of less than $150,000 and 17 percent ranged from $150,000 to $199,999. Another 16 percent ranged from $200,000 up to the national median of $270,000, 21 percent were more than $270,000. All percentages were similar to those in the second quarter of 2019.
• In Metropolitan Statistical Areas with sufficient sales data to analyze, 87 percent of Opportunity Zones had median third quarter sales prices that were less than the median values for the surrounding MSAs. Among those, 31 percent had median sales prices that were less than half the figure for the MSAs. At the same time, 13 percent of the zones had median sales prices that were equal to or above the median sales price of the broader MSAs.
• The Midwest continued to have the highest rate of Opportunity Zone tracts with a median home price of less than $150,000 (71 percent), followed by the South (56 percent), the Northeast (47 percent) and the West (12 percent).
• States with the highest percentage of census tracts meeting Opportunity Zone requirements include Wyoming (17 percent), Mississippi (15 percent), Alabama (13 percent), North Dakota (12 percent) and New Mexico (12 percent). Washington, DC, also is among the leaders (14 percent). Nationwide, 10 percent of all tracts qualify.

Report methodology

The ATTOM Data Solutions Opportunity Zones analysis is based on home sales price data derived from recorded sales deeds. Statistics for previous quarters are revised when each new report is issued as more deed data becomes available. ATTOM Data Solutions compared median home prices in tracts designated as Opportunity Zones by the Internal Revenue Service. Except where noted, tracts were used for the analysis if they had at least five sales in each quarter from 2005 through the third quarter of 2019. Median household income data for tracts and counties comes from surveys taken the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov) from 2013 through 2017. The list of designated Qualified Opportunity Zones is located at U.S. Department of the Treasury. Regions are based on designations by the Census Bureau. Hawaii and Alaska, which the bureau designates as part of the Pacific region, were included in the West region for this report.

About ATTOM Data Solutions

ATTOM Data Solutions provides premium property data to power products that improve transparency, innovation, efficiency and disruption in a data-driven economy. ATTOM multi-sources property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, environmental risk, natural hazard, and neighborhood data for more than 155 million U.S. residential and commercial properties covering 99 percent of the nation’s population. A rigorous data management process involving more than 20 steps validates, standardizes and enhances the data collected by ATTOM, assigning each property record with a persistent, unique ID — the ATTOM ID. The 9TB ATTOM Data Warehouse fuels innovation in many industries including mortgage, real estate, insurance, marketing, government and more through flexible data delivery solutions that include bulk file licenses, APIs, real estate market trends, marketing lists, match & append and introducing the first property data delivery solution, a cloud-based data platform that streamlines data management – Data-as-a-Service (DaaS).