TWIN FALLS, Idaho — How tough is it to buy a home in the Treasure and Magic Valleys? Pretty tough. And now, we have a better idea of how tough it is, county to county.
NBC just rolled something called the Home Buyer's Index. It's for folks like you, if you're looking to finally buy a home, and the Bellets. They began shopping for a home in 2020. Four years, two babies, one dog, and eight rejected offers later, they are still in a rental.
"I don't think that we anticipated five years into our marriage, we'd still be renting," said Erika Bellet. "The prices of the houses plus those high interest rates really make it just unrealistic to be able to afford what it will cost you monthly to own a house."
But exactly how unrealistic is it? How tough is it? NBC's new Home Buyer's Index tries to put a rating on how realistic or unrealistic it is. The index takes into account median home sales prices, mortgage rates, and housing inventory. It gives a rating from 0 to 100, with 0 being the easiest and 100 being near impossible to buy a home.
Right now, nationwide, the Home Buyer’s Index sits at 82.4, near an all-time high. Also, the index shows it's been harder the past two years to buy a home than any other period in the last decade.
That's nationally. How do we look locally? Not good, either. The Index right now is only using numbers from 14 counties in Idaho. They're excluding the more rural counties and counties with resort towns full of investment properties.
In Ada County the rating is 71.7. That's surprisingly good. High cost and interest rates are driving that rating. The above graphs track the rising prices on top, the falling buying power in the middle, and the affordability gap on the bottom. That affordability gap shows the blue line with the median income and the green line with the median-priced home. Those flipped a few years ago.
That’s just like in Canyon County. You can see how a person making the median income cannot afford the median-priced home. The index in Canyon sits at just 63.3. That's second best in the state of the 14 counties rated. Despite high cost and interest rates, just like in Ada County, NBC says the competition is relatively low and inventory is relatively high. The key word there is "relatively." Overall, competition is still fierce, and inventory just can't keep up.
But all that is not as bad as in the toughest county, according to this rating, to buy a home in this state, Twin Falls County. There’s all bad news here, as prices are up, buying power is way down, and that affordability gap is flipped. Prices, competition, and interest rates have all driven Twin Falls County to one of the worst home buyer ratings in the country: 27th worst in the nation. You will find more expensive homes in bigger cities, but you will also find higher wages typically. This rating takes all that into account.
Again, there are 44 counties in the state, and only 14 are rated by NBC in this Index. So, it's not a complete picture. But the big takeaway here is that things are tough everywhere, with the nation's rating at 82.4. That's up from about 27 a little more than a decade ago.
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