ATTOM: Opportunity Zone Home Prices Rising

Prices for single-family homes located in federally designated Opportunity Zones continued to increase at about the same rate as sales in other areas in the second-quarter of 2021, but home values continued to lag behind the national median, according to a new report.

ATTOM, curator of the nation's premier property database, today released its second-quarter 2021 Opportunity Zones report analyzing qualified low-income zones established by Congress in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. In its report, ATTOM looked at 5,236 zones across the United States with sufficient sales data to analyze, meaning they had at least five home sales in the second quarter.

The report found that median single-family home prices increased from the second quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2021 in 75 percent of Opportunity Zones, and rose by at least 15 percent in about half of them. Price patterns in Opportunity Zones continued to roughly track trends in other areas of the U.S., even surpassing them in some ways, much as they did in the first quarter of this year.

Home values in Opportunity Zones, however, did continue to lag well behind the national median of $305,000 in the second quarter of 2021. About three-quarters of the zones with enough data to analyze had typical second-quarter prices below the national figure. Some 39 percent also still had median prices of less than $150,000 in the second quarter of this year. But that was down from 47 percent a year earlier, as values inside some of the nation's poorest communities kept surging ahead with the broader national housing market, despite the Coronavirus pandemic remaining a threat to the U.S. economy.

Even as the national economy was gradually recovering during the spring of 2021 from the economic damage that came after the pandemic hit early last year, the impact continued to hit hardest in lower-income communities that comprise most of the zones targeted for tax breaks designed to spur economic redevelopment. Nevertheless, Opportunity Zones largely kept pace with national home-price trends as increases roughly paralleled the nationwide boom now in its 10th year.

Opportunity Zones are defined in the Tax Act legislation as census tracts in or alongside low-income neighborhoods that meet various criteria for redevelopment in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. Census tracts, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, cover areas that have 1,200 to 8,000 residents, with an average of about 4,000 people.

"Housing markets kept chugging along in some of the nation's poorest neighborhoods during the second quarter of this year in another sign that the decade long home-price boom across the nation knows pretty much no boundaries,” said Todd Teta, chief product officer with ATTOM. “Values kept rising inside specially designated Opportunity Zones at around the same rate as they did in other areas even as the Coronavirus pandemic continued causing economic hardship."

Still, he said, “property values in Opportunity Zones remain depressed. But the price spikes there not only suggest that those communities are a very viable option for households priced out of more-upscale neighborhoods. They also indicate the ongoing potential for the economic revival that underpins the Opportunity Zone tax breaks."

For more on the ATTOM report, click here.