July 2021 Wall Street Journal Emerging Housing Markets Index

As the U.S. continues to move past the disruption of the pandemic, households and businesses alike are searching for a new normal. While many are back to work on-location, some continue to have more flexibility around where they will work making moves from one part of the country to another a possibility for more and more home searchers.

With the housing market changes, there are new communities that see the rise of value and Two Indiana communities are among the top 20 emerging housing markets, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal and Realtor.com. The publication suggests the addition of real estate tax data to the emerging housing markets index as a part of the reason.

Fort Wayne ranks No. 3 across the U.S, with an improvement of 31 spots and Elkhart-Goshen now ranks No. 13, up 37 positions from the previous quarterly report.

“We were looking for real-estate tax friendly markets. Areas with higher effective real estate taxes were ranked lower while areas with lower effective real estate taxes are ranked higher,” explained the WSJ.

The index identifies markets that will be good areas in which to purchase a real estate. WSJ uses housing market data, real estate taxes, overall economic vitality, and quality of life metrics to develop the index.

The Journal says while the emerging housing markets have lower home prices, they also tend to have lower average wages.

The top 20 emerging housing markets list is dominated by smaller markets. The average population size among the top 20 was just over 300,000, placing them overwhelmingly in the smaller half of the top markets. The largest market on the WSJ emerging markets list is Raleigh, NC which with a population of 1.4 million is slightly smaller than last quarter’s largest market that made the top 20, Austin, TX (2.2 million), yet it’s still big enough to rank among the 50 largest metro areas in the country.

While two Hoosier communities climbed in ranking, one Indiana community dropped. Lafayette-West Lafayette declined 15 positions from No. 6 in the first quarter index. No reason was provided in the index for the drop.

With more and more people searching for homes for sale in Indiana, one should not expect the housing market in Indianapolis to be a secret for much longer.