Your Guide To Idaho's Housing Boom & Bust

Background

Molly Messick / StateImpact

A foreclosed home near Boise, Idaho.

This page is no longer being updated. For ongoing coverage of this topic, go to Boise State Public Radio’s website.

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.

Latest Posts

Follow this topic

August 6, 2012

More Homeowners Are Underwater In Idaho Than The National Average

The percentage of homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages has increased in Idaho, even as the local housing market has begun to improve. Data collected by CoreLogic show there’s a larger percentage of underwater mortgages in the Gem State than the U.S. average. Negative equity, often referred to as ‘underwater’, simply means a homeowner […]

July 27, 2012

Better Late Than Never: Housing Sector Contributes To Growth

On the heels of the bad news that the U.S. economy expanded at an annual rate of only 1.5 percent from April through June, there’s this observation from The Wall Street Journal today: housing is finally contributing to economic growth. The housing bubble is a large part of what got the U.S. into its economic […]

July 26, 2012

Why New Home Sales Have Slowed In Boise

New home sales took a dive in June, falling by more than 8 percent nationwide. That’s according to a report out this week from the Commerce Department. But that national trend doesn’t hold as true in the Boise area, which accounts for a large number of Idaho’s new home sales. According to data from the […]

July 12, 2012

Idaho Housing Market Shows Steady Improvement

RealtyTrac’s midyear foreclosure report gives emphasis to the mantra we’ve been hearing all year about Idaho’s housing market: it’s improving. Idaho still clocks in at 16th on the housing data provider’s ranking of states’ foreclosure rates. But RealtyTrac’s numbers show the state’s rate fell by more than 10 percent from April through June, and by […]

July 5, 2012

Mountain West Recovery Outpaces Nation’s, Brookings Says

Boise home values have improved by nearly five percent from their post-recession low. That’s enough of an increase that a recent Brookings Institution report ranks the city first for its house price recovery. StateImpact reported that finding early this week. The report also shows that Boise’s improved home prices are part of a broader recovery […]

July 3, 2012

Boise’s Recovery Earns Strong Marks, But There’s A Catch

Boise earned sixth place in a recent ranking of cities’ economic recoveries, a strong finish that’s based largely on improvement in local home prices. The Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor sizes up the turnaround in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas based on four indicators: employment, unemployment, output and house prices. It focuses on how much […]

June 14, 2012

Foreclosure Numbers Show Idaho’s Upward Trend

Idaho saw a 9 percent uptick in foreclosure filings from April to May, according to housing data provider RealtyTrac. That mirrors the 9 percent rise in foreclosure activity seen nationally over the same period. RealtyTrac says foreclosure activity is picking up in the wake of the landmark, multi-billion dollar mortgage settlement reached earlier this year.

June 11, 2012

Recession Set Families Back Decades, Fed Survey Shows

The Federal Reserve dropped a sobering statistic on the American public today: 40 percent. That’s the proportion of median net worth families lost from 2007 to 2010. The Wall Street Journal pulls no punches in describing the number’s significance: “The data released Monday are the real, step-back deal. In 2010, the median net worth of […]

As Family Income Drops, Idahoans Fare Better Than Most

At a time when economic news appears to come in two forms, “grim” and “grimmer,” this opening line from an article in today’s New York Times is especially bleak. Binyamin Appelbaum writes: “The recent financial crisis left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than they had in the early 1990s, erasing […]

June 8, 2012

Housing Settlement Dollars Go Toward Tax Revenue Gap, Not Homeowners

Most of the $13.5 million Idaho received as part of the multibillion-dollar mortgage settlement reached earlier this year has gone into the state’s general fund, as StateImpact recently reported. Now, the state Division of Financial Management’s May report shows that the $13 million directed into the general fund last month helped to offset weaker-than-expected individual […]