Philadelphia is One of the Country’s Top Housing Markets

From coast to coast, real estate is seeing a major surge. It’s a hot seller’s market, with home prices high and inventory tight in most of America’s metro areas. But, according to Econsult Solutions, an economics consulting firm based in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love might just be one of the hottest housing markets of all. As per a proprietary index, Philly home prices have seen double-digit increases since this time last year, with annual appreciation in 2017 averaging about twenty percent.

Philadelphia is a city on the grow!

According to MarketWatch, “Like any housing index, Econsult’s has some human adjustments that take into account seasonal sales patterns, quality and age of housing stock, and other factors. But unadjusted median sales prices show similar patterns: prices through the first quarter of the year are 15% higher than in the same period in 2016, for example, and surged to a 32% annual gain in April.” It’s critical to note that Econsult’s index covered Philadelphia only, and that indices that took all of Delaware County into account might show lower numbers.

Jonathan Tannen, an Econsult director who’s studied housing markets throughout his career, says it is high time that Philadelphia distinguished itself among housing markets in New York and Boston, two cities that it is often overshadowed by. “Philadelphia’s job market for a long time had lagged other comparable cities but finally in the last two quarters, we’ve seen faster job growth so that would suggest that these price gains are real,” Tannen was quoted as saying to MarketWatch.

Another native economist, Mark Zandi, confirmed Philadelphia’s epic growth and disproved the notion that the city could be experiencing a bubble. While there are undoubtedly underprivileged areas of the area where prices are stagnant, they are far outnumbered by the areas of boom. Downtown, he points out, is seeing the kind of expansion that only comes rarely.