【World Property Journal】Home Price Appreciation in U.S. Opportunity Zones Less Than National Average

According to ATTOM Data Solutions, the median U.S. home prices increased from the third quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2020 in 74 percent of the zones and rose by more than 10 percent in slightly more than half the zones.

Those gains revealed that housing markets in Opportunity Zones continued improving in the third quarter of 2020, even as the Coronavirus pandemic spread throughout the nation, damaging large sectors of the American economy. The impact generally hit hardest in lower-income communities that include most of the zones targeted for tax breaks designed to spur redevelopment.

But the price gains in Opportunity Zones fell below the pace of improvements in broader metropolitan statistical areas throughout the country: every metro area with enough data to analyze in the third quarter of 2020 showed year-over-year median price increases, while three quarters of those areas saw prices jump more than 10 percent.

The report also shows that 76 percent of the Opportunity Zones analyzed had median home prices in the third quarter of 2020 that were less than the national median of $283,813 - roughly the same percentage that were below the national figure in the second quarter of 2020. About 36 percent of the zones still had median prices of less than $150,000, also about the same as in the prior quarter.

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