Rock River Valley home values hold their own

August 6th, 2008 at 01:50pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Back in the early 2000s, Joel Cowen, the Rock River Valley’s guru of statistics and trends, told execs at the Rockford Register Star that the explosive home values seen in the late 1990s and early years of the century were an aberration and no one should start thinking they were here to stay.

He was blunt: We see three, maybe four or five, percent growth in home values, not this eight, nine, 10 percent stuff, he said. You own a home, it increases three percent a year and that’s it. We are a stable housing market (not to mention, of course, affordable.)

It was hard to swallow Cowen’s sober interpretation. After all, the region was coming off the depressed values underpinned by the decades-long school desegregation lawsuit. We were rejoicing at the rebound, at recovering some of that perceived devaluation. It was go-go times and way nice to see the market value of one’s house increase. I mean, what homeowner doesn’t want the house to be worth $15,000 more this year than last? (well, except that does also mean the tax bite is likely to increase.) I know some folks thought Cowen a sourpuss and bought into the idea that the housing fundamentals of the Rock River Valley market had changed forever.

We got used to values increasing, subdivisions multiplying, and homes selling in days, if not hours. As 2003 took off and headed toward 2007, it looked like Cowen’s conservative trend-reading was off base. Not so much.

When the mortgage lending fiasco blew up and sent the nation’s housing market into tailspins in some parts of the country, the Rock River Valley held its own. Instead of seeing home values tumbling by 50 percent, we’re seeing 3.5 percent or less. We are not Florida, California or the Northeast, which are reeling from stratospheric increases in home prices followed by an equally horrifying race to the bottom. We are doing what the region always does: Bump along the middle. Up a little, down a little, but stable all the way.

I won’t be disingenuous. It is tough in this market economically, and I blogged about it recently. It takes longer to sell a house and sales are fewer. But, there are some important things to be grateful for, and one is that “bump along the middle.”

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