With all the news about home prices collapsing, Jennifer Anderson got a little nervous last year after learning that she and her husband, Bryan, would have to sell their home. The Army was moving the family from Fort Campbell in Clarksville, Tenn., to Fort Lewis near Seattle.
Fortunately, the couple had an offer one week after listing their 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom and two-bath home. Within about a month, they had sold it to another soldier for $123,900 — 17 percent more than they had paid three years earlier.
“It went really quick,’’ said Jennifer, a stay-at-home mother of two children. “We put the house on the market on a Wednesday, the week before Thanksgiving, and someone called and wanted to look at the house on Friday. They put in a bid on Monday.”
When it comes to weathering the housing crisis, not all neighborhoods are equal. Real estate agents and appraisers say some places that didn’t get a glut of new home construction are faring better, and some are even seeing modest price increases.
Meanwhile, homeowners who bought brand-new homes at the peak of the housing construction boom in fresh subdivisions are a little worse off on average. And neighborhoods hit hard by a wave of foreclosures have also seen steeper price declines than the average 4.3 percent drop in home prices from 2007 to 2008, based on a study of Nashville-area sales data.
Homeowners content to buy older houses in more established neighborhoods, though, generally came out winners or saw their homes absorb only small price declines.
Those are among facts borne out by a study of last year’s home prices in Middle Tennessee by Richard Exton of Manier and Exton Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants.
He found that places holding their values better than others included Clarksville, Gallatin, West Meade and the East Nashville 37206 ZIP code.
All of those neighborhoods did better than Brentwood and Franklin in terms of holding values. And Brentwood and Franklin did better than northwest Nashville and Madison, which were hit with higher-than-average foreclosures, as well as the disappearance of subprime lending and the loss of some down-payment assistance programs.
“There are neighborhoods I go in where three out of five houses are in foreclosure,’’ said Bob Cable of Prudential Woodmont Realty. triggerAd(2,PaginationPage,11);
Other areas with steeper price drops in 2008 were Antioch and Smyrna, which have a lot of new home construction and saw average home prices fall 6.6 percent and 7.4 percent, respectively.
Pressure is on builders
The consultant’s figures don’t include current home prices, which some appraisers say may have fallen even more than during 2008. In fact, many banks are questioning appraisals that include comparable home sales more than 6 months old, because the market is changing so fast.
In addition, it’s impossible to look at an entire city and make generalizations, said Danny Wiley, owner of The Wiley Group, an appraiser in Nashville. Some-brand new neighborhoods are seeing only a slight decline in values while just down the street, a row of foreclosures means bad news for the homeowners next door.
“It’s really what submarket are you talking about,’’ Wiley said.
The neighborhoods with a lot of new home construction are under more pressure than those that aren’t, particularly if a homebuilder is liquidating homes in bankruptcy.
“The number of sales has dropped off the table in a lot of areas,’’ Wiley said. “It looks like a ski slope in some areas.”
That has put a lot of pressure on builders, who have to sell houses to pay debts and other expenses. Most homeowners, on the other hand, don’t have to sell. They can wait until the market improves to get a better price.
“If you own your home, you can decide you’ll wait for the market to turn around, whereas a builder might say, ‘I just need to cut my losses and move on,’ ” said Gary Ashton, a broker with Ashton Real Estate Group of Re/Max Elite. “That puts downward pressure on the prices.”
In Brentwood, builders are slashing prices in some cases by the tens of thousands of dollars.
In the Berkley Walk neighborhood, builder John Wieland Homes cut prices on several homes, including one by $130,000 to $619,900. The home has 4,600 square feet of space and four bedrooms. At Wetherbrooke, another Wieland neighborhood in Brentwood, a 5,300-square-foot house was reduced $95,000 to $769,900.
The Adelicia condominium project in Midtown Nashville advertised price discounts earlier this year of 17 percent to 35 percent — a savings of about $96,000 on average for a one-bedroom unit. More than 90 percent of the units have been sold, and the project has already turned a profit, the developers have said.
Despite recent price declines, though, home prices generally are still higher than they were just three or four years ago. Franklin home prices were about 30 percent higher in 2008 on average than in 2004, for example, sales data show.
Homeowners who have been in their homes more than a couple of years remain ahead in the values game, said Steve Fridrich of Fridrich & Clark Realty in Nashville.
Owners such as Jennifer Anderson and her husband, who sold the home in Clarksville with the help of real estate agent Norma Gann, say they were pleased with their investment.
After paying several thousand dollars for upgrades, including adding onto a deck, building a privacy fence and installing new carpeting, the military couple still had $1,500 in cash in their pockets after selling their home for a nice profit, paying off the mortgage and paying a real estate commission. The Andersons don’t plan to buy yet in Seattle.
Clarksville certainly is a special case, with a military base of roughly 25,000 soldiers who don’t have to worry about getting laid off by the Army even with a slowing economy. Anderson said she and her husband were glad they bought a modest house there in 2005, and were able to sell it quickly when the time came.
“We really didn’t want a brand-new house,’’ she said of the now-8-year-old property. “Plus, we couldn’t afford them.”
