Housing Market Fever Starts to Break in Boise
The city, one of the pandemic-era havens for remote work, is flirting with falling prices in a healthy reversal of excess.
Boise’s real estate wobble might be a sign of things to come for some pandemic hot spots.
Photographer: Kyle Green/Bloomberg
If you’re wondering where the U.S. real estate market might start to show its first cracks, keep an eye on Boise, Idaho. The pandemic work-from-anywhere revolution transformed it into one of the hottest markets in the U.S., but home prices are leveling off there. Typical home values in Boise rose just 0.4% last month, down from a 4.1% monthly pace in June, according to Zillow data. That makes it the first of the country’s top 100 housing markets to flirt with falling prices this year.
The incredible pace of gains was never going to be sustainable, of course, and that’s true of many of the pandemic-era miracle markets, even if you’re ultimately bullish on their long-term prospects. The slowdown is hitting some Western mountain towns now, but it’s also likely to catch up with Austin, Texas; Phoenix; and Tampa, Florida, among others. For all their lifestyle appeal and relative value compared with California or New York, some of these markets compressed a decade worth of home price appreciation into a couple of years — a development that became downright unhealthy.