Your Guide To Idaho's Housing Boom & Bust

Background

Molly Messick / StateImpact

A foreclosed home near Boise, Idaho.

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The Boise-metro market was hardest hit in Idaho’s housing crisis, with foreclosures concentrated in Ada and Canyon Counties.

Idaho’s housing boom was centered around its two main metropolitan areas, Boise and Coeur d’Alene.

John Starr of the global real estate company Colliers International had a front-row seat as capital poured into the local housing markets in the years preceding the bust.

When he thinks of the early 2000s, he remembers watching land prices rise with demand, and house lots shrink. What the area wound up with, he says, were more and more subdivisions, packed tight with houses.

Census data show that the state’s population grew by more than 28 percent from 1990 to 2000, and by more than 20 percent from 2000 to 2010. Starr said that’s due in large part to growth at Micron Technology. That growth, in turn, fueled Idaho’s housing boom.

“The reason we were doubling the national average growth rate was we were moving in a whole bunch of people that we couldn’t produce here in Idaho, namely electrical engineers and so forth to work at Micron. The data points that people were looking at that were helping them make decisions about coming to Boise and deploying capital and building and helping us grow – those data points were skewed.” – John Starr, Colliers International

According to Metrostudy, a housing and data information company, Boise’s housing market began to bottom out in 2009.

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January 16, 2013

Idaho’s Construction Industry Slogs Through Slow Growth

Earlier this week Stateline wrote about signs of the construction industry turnaround. Their opening scene: downtown Boise. “The corner of 8th and Main streets in downtown Boise, Idaho, was jokingly called “the hole” because it had been vacant since a 1987 fire there. No more. Construction began last summer on a new $60-million building that’s […]

January 11, 2013

What We’re Reading: $8.5 Billion, And A Lot Of Problems

Idaho’s housing market underwent a dramatic turnaround in 2012. The state’s foreclosure rate began to come down. Single family homes began to make up some of their staggering loss in value. Now, Boise is showing stronger signs of recovery than most metro areas, according to the Brookings Institution. But 2011 — when Idaho posted one […]

December 20, 2012

Rising Home Prices Bolster Boise’s Economic Turnaround, Report Says

Boise continues to rank near the top in a survey of 100 U.S. cities’ economic recoveries. That’s thanks mainly to its home price improvement since the depths of the downturn. The report, published by The Brookings Institution, evaluates cities’ economies as of the third quarter, from July to September of this year. It ranks Boise number […]

October 11, 2012

Idaho Foreclosures Ticked Up In Summer Months

Idaho saw more foreclosure filings from July through September than it did in the previous quarter of the year, according to RealtyTrac data released today. The number of filings inched up by 5.6 percent from the second to third quarters. Idaho has the 14th highest foreclosure rate in the nation, with one of every 294 […]

September 25, 2012

More Than 12,000 Idaho Borrowers Could Receive Mortgage Settlement Checks

The historic $25 billion national mortgage settlement reached in February could result in direct payments to more than 12,200 Idaho borrowers. That’s how many Idahoans are eligible to share in nearly $10 million in direct payments from Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. The borrowers were on the receiving […]

September 18, 2012

Boise Economy Shows Relative Strength In Shaky Recovery

Early this year, as a signs of economic recovery faded into yet another spring slump, Boise for the most part held its ground. That’s the main local takeaway from the Brookings Institution’s current Metro Monitor report, which sizes up the health of urban economies from April through June. Idaho’s unemployment rate held steady during that […]

September 17, 2012

Buying Trumps Renting In Boise’s Recovering Housing Market

It is, in general, cheaper to own than rent. That’s the broad finding of a recent report from real estate website Trulia. How much cheaper? Assuming a 3.5 percent mortgage rate and 20 percent down payment, among other things, “buying is now 45 percent cheaper than renting in the 100 largest U.S. metros, on average […]

September 13, 2012

In One Year, Idaho’s Foreclosure Rate Posts A 60 Percent Drop

Idaho’s foreclosure rate was the fifth highest in the nation when housing data provider RealtyTrac released its numbers at this time a year ago. At that time, John Starr of Collier’s International gave a folksy, downbeat description of the local foreclosure problem. “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody who has been personally […]

August 23, 2012

Idaho’s Foreclosure Problem: Better, But Still Here

A foreclosure counseling event in downtown Boise Wednesday offered a window into how homeowners are faring, years after Idaho’s foreclosure rate began to climb. The basic message was this: we’re not out of the woods yet. In August 2011, Idaho’s foreclosure rate was the fifth highest in the nation, based on data from RealtyTrac. But […]

August 9, 2012

Idaho Foreclosure Filings Tick Up From June, Annually It’s A Different Story

RealtyTrac data released today illustrates a mixed picture of Idaho’s housing market. The foreclosure tracker looks at two things each month: annual changes, and month-to-month changes. In Idaho, the annual trends are positive. It’s the month-to-month data that tends to be more volatile. Idaho’s foreclosure rate ticked up slightly by just under one percentage point […]