If you see the stories about an improving real estate market, yet the value of your home is down, you are not alone.
As real estate mavens will tell you: it’s all about location, some locations are doing better than others and some parts of metro Atlanta have not seen the brightening of real estate most visible in town and northern suburbs.
So despite continued, if modest, recovery of the overall housing market, more than 22 percent of metro Atlanta homes have lost value during the past year, according to a study.
“Atlanta is actually doing very well,” said Svenja Gudell, chief economist for Zillow, the Seattle-based research firm that carried out the analysis. “But we’re still seeing a number of homes losing value. The reality is there are still areas lagging behind in the recovery.”
Overall, the median price in the region was up 5.7 percent, she said.
Zillow has a database of 110 million homes and tracks home sales around the country. The company uses computer modeling to assess how values change – not just for the homes sold, but for others around them, Gudell said.
Nationally, nearly 28 percent of homes lost value, while the media value edged up 3.3 percent during the year, according to Zillow.
In general, the markets with the fewest homes losing value were those that were really hot, like San Francisco, which has had double-digit growth in median values, Gudell said.
The level in Atlanta now is higher than normal, but not dramatically higher.
For the two decades before Atlanta’s housing bubble grew dangerously and burst, the area averaged 20.6 percent of properties with values dropping. After the bubble burst and the region plunged into a deep recession, there were months where more than 90 percent of homes were losing value.
The recent fall in that number is one more sign that things are getting better, Gudell said. “It’s a good sign if the number keeps dropping.”
