Is the age of the home a detriment to resale?

I haven't heard this one in a while.

Is the age of the home a detriment to resale?

That’s a great question and it gave me another reason to dig deep in the new Market Intel tool that I am testing.

With so many new homes under construction, it would be easy to assume that is what most buyers want today.  

You see new construction everywhere: downtown, in the city and throughout Metro Nashville.

Yet I wasn’t convinced.

So I thought about these two things before I looked at the numbers.

First, very few homes were built in Nashville in the five years following 2008.  Many builders crashed in this housing crisis when the inventory of homes skyrocketed.  

Once you shut a large operation down, it just doesn’t start back overnight. Large neighborhoods may take years of development and planning before the first foundation is poured.  

So it is possible that some of this is due to pent up demand for new homes.

Second, the reason many of our clients have chosen new construction is that they could not find the home that they wanted that was already built.

In other words, they did not have much of a choice if they wanted to check off most of the items on their wish list.    

And they typically didn’t have to deal with multiple offers if they bought new construction.

So it became easier to get under contract which may have contributed to the numbers.  

Still not sure what I would find, I decided it was time to look at the numbers.

And this is what they said about Nashville.

The highest appreciating homes in Metro Nashville were built prior to 1964.  These homes gained at a rate of 6.7% last year and are forecasted to hit 3.2% over the coming year.  

The second highest are those which were built after 2000.  These homes appreciated 4.8% last year with a forecast of 2.4% for the next twelve months.  

While these numbers don’t fully answer the question, it backs up my gut feeling that many people prefer historic homes or new construction to the homes built in between.

What did you expect to see in the numbers?

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